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GNR 7-9-25: Your Wednesday's Good News Roundup [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-07-09
Good morning, gnusies! Welcome to another second Wednesday of the month, this July 9, 2025.
Allow me to offer a respite, a brain cleanser if I may, of good music and news of the Good.
x YouTube Video
Portugal Announces New 38,000 Sq. Mile Protected Area Around ‘Stunning’ Underwater Mountains Out of a recent UN conference on the protection of the sea comes the news that Portugal has announced the creation of a new 38,000 square-mile marine protected area. Established around the Gorringe seamount, technically Portugal’s tallest mountain, the decision will take the nation’s total protected territorial waters to 27%, making the small Iberian country the continent leader in protected ocean waters. The announcement was made by the nation’s environment minister Maria da Graca Carvalho at the 3rd UN Oceans Conference in Nice. The conference focuses on implementing strategies and methods to achieve the goals set out in the 2023 High Seas Treaty, which has so far been ratified by 51 nations—9 short of entering legal force. ~~~ The Gorringe Ridge is located about 130 miles (210 km) west of Portugal, between the Azores and the Strait of Gibraltar. It is notable for an enormous diversity of sea life, particularly “soft corals,” or gorgonians, and deep-sea sponges, which inhabit some 1,100 reefs along the ridge. ~~~ Emanuel Gonçalves, chief scientist at Oceano Azul Foundation, a separate nonprofit that mapped the area with the Portuguese navy, told Reuters that the total protected area would be around 100,000 square kilometers, enough to “connect seamounts, abyssal plains, and open ocean, and create a safe haven to highly mobile and migratory species, and deep sea habitats”.
Mercury Emissions Fall 70% Over the Last Four Decades Thanks to UN Treaty, Coal Phase-Out A study examining mercury concentrations in the leaves of alpine plants has revealed that humanity has reduced worldwide exposure to this most toxic of heavy metals substantially. Controlled via a UN treaty called the Minamata Convention on Mercury Emissions, mercury (Hg) enters the atmosphere through a variety of natural and anthropogenic avenues. ~~~ A team of Chinese scientists from schools in Tianjin, Beijing, Tibet, and Nanjing has found that Hg concentrations in the atmosphere reduced by 70% since a peak in the year 2000. For the next 20 years, the levels continually dropped, corresponding with a reduced reliance on coal for power and the implementation of the Minamata Convention in 2013. The scientists were able to calculate the past atmospheric Hg concentrations using the leaves of the flowering plant Androsace tapete on the slopes Mt. Everest atop the Tibetan Plateau. Here, exposure to atmospheric deposition is far greater than at sea level, and the plateau is a popular place for making such measurements. Their study shows that today, there is less mercury emitted into the atmosphere by humans than by the Earth itself.
I’ve been seeing new potential treatments for Alzheimer’s and diabetes lately; it’s Parkinson’s turn now.
Targeting newly-identified brain protein brings hope of new treatment for Parkinson's disease The research team, led by Professor Kay Double from the Brain and Mind Centre, has spent more than a decade studying the biological mechanisms underpinning the condition, with the aim of finding new treatments to slow or stop its progression. In 2017, the team published a paper in Acta Neuropathologica, identifying for the first time the presence of an abnormal form of a protein – called SOD1 – in the brains of patients diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. ~~~ The newest study by the same University of Sydney team, published in Acta Neuropathologica Communications, builds on this research. It found that targeting the faulty SOD1 protein with a drug treatment improved the motor function in mice bred to have Parkinson-like symptoms. Professor Double said: “All the mice we treated saw a dramatic improvement in their motor skills which is a really promising sign it could be effective in treating people who have Parkinson disease too. "We hoped that by treating this malfunctioning protein, we might be able to improve the Parkinson-like symptoms in the mice we were treating – but even we were astonished by the success of the intervention.”
A lot of so-called new paleontological discoveries these days are made not at new digs, but in the storage drawers and back rooms of museums.
Newly Unveiled T-Rex Relative Was Sitting in Museum Drawer for 50 Years and ‘Rewrites’ Family Tree It was Ph.D. student Jared Voris who first recognized something was wrong with the labeling when he found the two partially-complete fossil skeletons in the drawers. The new species has been named Khankhuuluu mongoliensis, or Dragon Prince of Mongolia. It is a “prince” rather than a “rex” (king) because of its smaller, fleet-footed build. Weighing around the same as a show jumping horse, the animal represents not only an earlier stage of Tyrannosaurid evolution, but also a diversification in the lineage that reflects the connectivity between North America and Eurasia at the time the animal lived. About one-eighth the size of Tyrannosaurus rex, K. mongoliensis lived 86 million years ago under the shadows of larger predatory therapods. Described by Professor Zelenitsky as “really messy,” the understood history of T. rex was muddled by missing links between Asia and North America. In their study presenting K. mongoliensis, the authors use it as a link to explain how Tyrannosaurids evolved across the two continents.
Lots more info at the link!
I found the headline to be a little misleading overall — there are parallels to other locations’ battles with urchins, and the importance of protecting predatory species in keeping ecosystems stable. But the potential benefits, economically speaking as well as ecological, in turning management of the sea urchin population and kelp forests in Australia into local industry is pretty cool.
Harvesting sea urchins could save dying kelp forests all while making $92M, new study finds “Managing the bay’s sea urchin population is a practical step we can take to ensure the health of Port Phillip Bay, which is crucial to local ecosystems, tourism, and food security,” Carnell said in an interview with RMIT. ~~~ In the economic impact report, Carnell and his colleagues estimated that a $50 million investment in targeted sea urchin culling and kelp restoration could lead to a cumulative return of $92 million. “Now we have the figures to show this is also a smart economic investment,” Carnell said. “This approach can be targeted to specific areas of the bay, so we can get the greatest bang for our buck.” Carnell said that the $50 million investment would create jobs in commercial diving sectors by paying crews to harvest sea urchins and cultivate emerging kelp forests. The $92 million return-on-investment was attributed to boosts to recreational fishing in the region, as well as the economic benefits of planting carbon-storing kelp and removing nitrogen from the bay.
That’s it for me, dear gnusies!
And now, the weather.
My name, as ever, is still not Cecil Baldwin. I promise.
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