OGN Monday

Editor OGN Daily
4 days ago
4 min read

Kick-starting the week with a global round up of good news nuggets.

Ancient cedar tree at Chiswick House, London — Credit: Clive Boursnell | Chiswick House & Gardens

Tree of The Year

The shortlist for the UK’s Tree of the Year includes a 300-year-old cedar (pictured) renowned for being scaled by The Beatles. The Woodland Trust’s annual competition is designed to highlight the environmental and cultural importance of all rare, ancient, or at-risk trees. This year’s theme is “rooted in culture,” to celebrate how trees have inspired the creative minds of authors, poets, musicians, filmmakers, and even politicians. “Our oldest trees hold more stories than Shakespeare,” actor Judi Dench, who is a patron of the Woodland Trust, said in a statement. “Some were putting down roots long before he began writing, more than 400 years ago. They are as much part of our heritage as any literature.”You can vote for your favorite now." Check out all the trees and cast your vote here. The winner will represent the country in the European Tree of the Year finals.

Astronomically Rare

The next two total solar eclipses will both pass over the same country, each occurring less than a year apart. Spain is the only country in the world to experience the path of totality for the solar eclipse on 12 August 2026, as well as the eclipse on 2 August 2027, offering sky gazers a unique opportunity to witness the celestial event. Six of the top 10 sunniest cities in Europe are in Spain, meaning there is little chance it will be obscured by clouds.

ancient fragment of a bronze military diploma from Sardinia dating to the second century C.E. — Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art

A.I. Aeneas

A new A.I. tool developed by Google DeepMind helps scholars fill in words missing from ancient inscriptions and estimate historical data about the textual artifacts, making educated guesses based on context and similar inscriptions. The tool is called Aeneas, after the hero from Roman mythology who defended his city against the Greeks during the Trojan War.

Scholars use ancient inscriptions to deepen our understanding of the Roman world, but they’re not always easy to decipher. To make sense of them, historians often turn to “parallels,” other texts that share similar wording, syntax or provenance. Aeneas was built to accelerate this work. The tool “reasons across thousands of Latin inscriptions, retrieving textual and contextual parallels in seconds that allow historians to interpret and build upon the model’s findings,” per a statement from Google DeepMind.

Oyster Recycling

In Connecticut, a two-person nonprofit team is on a mission to return millions of oyster shells to the ocean after they have been enjoyed in restaurants - rather than going into landfill. Why? Because oyster scraps play a vital role in supporting and restoring ecosystems, serving as essential bases for juvenile oysters to attach to and grow. Shells also prevent ocean erosion and support a diverse range of other marine life that rely on them for shelter. So Todd Koehnke and Tim Macklin, cofounders of the Collective Oyster Recycling and Restoration, have set out to restore the health of Connecticut’s overfished oyster beds by collecting shells from about 50 seafood restaurants in the state and dropping them back where they came from. “We just move shell, really, is what we do, and nature does all of the work,” Macklin told CBS News, adding that the team has returned around 700,000 pounds of oyster shells in two years.

de Havilland's Comet sitting on a runway — de Havilland's Comet

First Commercial Jet

Created by English aviation pioneer Geoffrey de Havilland, the Comet is considered the first commercial jet. And yesterday, 76 years ago (27 July 1949), it took its inaugural test flight; three years later, the British Overseas Aircraft Corporation began operating the world’s first commercial jet service. With a max speed of 480 miles per hour, the 44-seat Comet revolutionized air travel.

Zero Waste

Scientists have figured out how to turn Earth’s most abundant mineral into zero-waste battery metals. The most abundant mineral in earth’s crust is something called olivine: pretty in the gemstone peridot, but otherwise pretty useless. Now, reports IEEE Spectrum, New Zealand engineers have figured out how to dissolve olivine to yield silica (50%), magnesium (40%) and nickel-manganese-cobalt hydroxide (10%) for lithium-ion cathodes, leaving only brine.

Not Extinct After All

The world’s smallest snake - the Barbados threadsnake - is as thin as a strand of spaghetti and thought to be extinct. However, during a recent survey, Justin Springer, who had been looking for the threadsnake among other reptiles for more than a year, jokingly told his colleague: “I smell a threadsnake,” while turning over a rock trapped under a tree root. And there it was. "When you are so accustomed to looking for things and you don’t see them, you are shocked when you actually find it,” he said.

“Every summer, like the roses, childhood returns.” Marty Rubin

On This Day

28 July 1893: A petition organized by Kate Sheppard, demanding women's suffrage, is delivered to New Zealand's parliament, signed by over 25,000 women, a fifth of the adult European female population. Sheppard's efforts in leading the call for suffrage at the head of the Temperance Union led to New Zealand becoming the first country in the world to grant women the vote, later that year.