Thursday's Uplifting News

Editor OGN Daily
13 minutes ago
4 min read

Some tasty bite-sized chunks of uplifting news to brighten the day.

A slice of watermelon — Better be careful!

America's Weirdest Law?

If you were hoping to one day enjoy some watermelon in one of the public parks in the Indianapolis suburb of Beech Grove, you better think twice - lest you risk breaking the law. Indianapolis news outlet WRTV reported in 2017 it received confirmation from board members of Beech Grove's local government that a watermelon ban had been instituted several years before. The reason? Those pesky watermelon rinds were tearing holes in the trash bags lining the cans at public parks. Someone had enough! So, a call to action was made and a ban supposedly written into law, though the whereabouts of this written record remain unclear. Despite the fact that the law has been around since at least 2009, by all accounts, local law enforcement has neither time nor, it would appear, any interest in enforcing the ban.

Some Weird, Archaic UK Laws

A Good Extinction

In January, the Norwegian Road Federation released a statistic that turned heads inside transportation and climate circles: Almost 90 percent of new cars sold in Norway in 2024 were fully electric. By the end of this year, the government expects sales of new gasoline and diesel cars to fall to zero and meet its goal to end the sale of new gasoline-powered cars by 2025. In a country known for snowcapped mountains, dramatic fjords, and the Northern Lights - and often ranked as one of the “happiest countries in the world” - gasoline powered cars are on their way to extinction.

Wildlife Overpass

Colorado is constructing what state transportation officials say will be the "world's largest" wildlife overpass crossing on Interstate 25 between Denver and Colorado Springs. The $15 million project is designed to keep both animals (migrating elk, mule deer, pronghorn and other large game) and drivers safer on one of the state's busiest stretches of highway. The crossing is expected to curb vehicle-animal collisions along the corridor by 90 percent. The Greenland Wildlife Overpass will span 209 feet across six lanes of traffic and measure 200 feet wide, and connect 39,000 acres of big game habitat to more than one million acres of the Pike National Forest. The overpass just eclipses the scale of California's Santa Monica wildlife crossing.

Man sitting in an airport waiting for his flight — Speeding up the security checkpoint process

Shoes Can Stay On

For frequent American flyers and puzzled first-time visitors from Europe, a major security headache is due to finally to fade away into history’s rearview mirror. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has announced that passengers traveling through domestic airports can keep their shoes on while passing through security screening at TSA checkpoints. The new policy should help streamline the security checkpoint process, leading to lower wait times.

a mixed media artwork made with watercolour paint and felt-tip by Salvador Dali — Vecchio Sultano | Cheffins/Cambridge

Good Fortune

It is not a painting that screams it is a masterpiece by Salvador Dalí to the untrained eye. So when the unusual picture went up for auction in a house clearance sale in England's university city of Cambridge two years ago, it attracted only two bidders - and sold for £150. Now, it has been valued at around £30,000 after it was confirmed to be an illustration of an “old sultan” that Dalí painted in 1966. Vecchio Sultano, a mixed media artwork made with watercolour paint and felt-tip, is an illustration of a scene from The Arabian Nights - one of 500 illustrations the great surrealist artist intended to create of the Middle Eastern folktales.

Slice of gold being superheated with a laser — Credit: Greg Stewart | SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Entropy Catastrophe

Researchers recently heated a solid sample of gold with a laser to 19,000 Kelvin (33,740 degrees Fahrenheit) - which is hotter than the surface of the sun - without melting it. The process is called superheating, and as if that achievement wasn’t impressive enough on its own, the work claims two other major breakthroughs: Researchers directly measured such scalding temperatures for the first time ever, and they disproved a long-established prediction about superheating of solids. That’s because a long-standing theory from the 1980s suggests the superheating of solids cannot surpass around three times the solid’s melting temperature. This limit, known as the “entropy catastrophe,” is the point at which solids were thought to spontaneously melt. The work paves the way for studying more “warm dense matter,” such as modeling the inside of planets and fusion reactors.

“Light tomorrow with today!” Elizabeth Barrett Browning

On This Day

31 July 2012: At the Summer Games in London, American swimmer Michael Phelps captured an unprecedented 19th career Olympic medal when he helped the U.S. team win the 4 × 200 metre freestyle relay.