Good morning, Gnusies, and welcome to this morning’s Good News Roundup. It contains a lot of Ukraine news, but it’s news that I hope offers some illumination and some inspiration. In addition I’ve found plenty of news about good things happening all over the nation and the world. So pour yourself a big mug of your morning beverage of choice, settle into a comfortable chair, and let’s get started! And please add your thoughts in The Best Comment Section on the Internet™.

War is so horrific that it can seem almost obscene that life can continue normally for those untouched by it. Even those of us who are used to activism can feel paralyzed and guilty because there seems so little we can do.
Since we’re all struggling to find ways to respond to what’s happening in Ukraine, I can’t think of a better way to open today than with this beautiful statement by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which she sent to her mailing list on Saturday:
Sometimes people will ask me, “There is so much happening in the world and in the country, and it all feels so big and overwhelming – what can I even do as one person?” What I try to convey every time is that no action is too small, and if you feel so moved, you can and should start with whatever is within arm’s reach or in your backyard. You can even start with yourself.
We live in a culture of grand gestures and big ambitions, but that also means we should be wary of how much “get-rich-quick” thinking can perpetuate beyond money schemes and into the idea that any/all major, impactful shifts happen suddenly and in dramatic fashion with a handful of major figures. The fact is, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Revolutionary and transformative changes, from the inside out, happen more like mosaics.
Think of it like this: no matter who we are, how visible or invisible or big or small, each one of us is just one tile. Whether you see that as liberating or disempowering is a matter of perspective. When you have your eye pressed all the way up to the single tile of a mosaic, it can look quite meaningless. A single piece of shattered glass could look worthless. Or perhaps a piece of small painted porcelain could seem beautiful, but too small to “be” anything. Or maybe a stunning rare slab of stone may think itself as the biggest piece when it is really a corner tile. The secret is, it’s all significant.
The two secrets of mosaics are:
When we are able to step back from thinking our own broken, unfinished pieces are not enough, and start to see how all the other little pieces glistening alongside us start to form eyes and ears and abstract beauty and landscapes and symbols and more, we realize that just because we didn’t see the big picture at first doesn’t mean we weren’t part of one. So just do the small thing – for yourself and others. Choose your actions with humility, love, and enthusiasm. It means more than you know, and the world thanks you for it.
Take heart,
Alexandria
One way your little piece of the mosaic can join with others to create something significant is by donating to help the people of Ukraine, both those who are now refugees and those still inside the country. I’ll have more information about that farther down.
The lovely mosaic metaphor also made me think about the transformative power of art. So along with news, I’ll be bringing you music and visual art that resonates with what we’re seeing on the world stage and experiencing in our own hearts. 
Years ago, there was a bumper sticker I saw around Portland that said “Music is everything that war is not.” Switching GNR days with niftywriter allowed me to attend a glorious chamber music performance on Monday night. I went in burdened with all the sad news of the day, but the music went straight to my heart and brought more healing than I thought could be possible. And as you’ll see in some examples below, music is having the same effect on the Ukrainian people and people around the world.
At the Kennedy Center last week, pianist Emanuel Ax, violinist Leonidas Kavakos, and cellist Yo Yo Ma opened with an exquisite performance of the Ukrainian national anthem. 

And on Monday, the Metropolitan Opera performed a “Concert for Ukraine” featuring a young Ukranian bass-baritone:
Probably since humans first began making music, it has been a means of healing after tragedy. In a speech three days after the assassination of JFK, Leonard Bernstein said this:
“This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.”
From the BBC:
Ukraine has praised the courage of three European leaders who made a long, hazardous journey by rail from Poland to Kyiv in a show of support as the city came under further Russian attack. The prime ministers of Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic met Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky on Tuesday evening as a curfew began in Kyiv.
The trip was a Polish idea, after the EU warned of potential security risks.✂️
“Your visit is a powerful expression of support for Ukraine,” [Zelensky] is quoted as telling the group.
Ukraine’s Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal wrote on Twitter that “devastating” sanctions against Russia had been discussed, including the “recognition of Russia as a sponsor of terrorism”.
As the talks took place, loud explosions could be heard across Kyiv from fighting on the western edge of the capital.
The European Union said the politicians were not carrying any particular mandate, but that leaders in Brussels were aware of the trip, as it was mentioned during an informal EU summit in Versailles, France, last week. Poland’s deputy foreign minister Marcin Przydacz admitted the trip was risky, but said it was “worth taking for the sake of values”. He said they had told the Russians the visit was taking place.
The leaders decided to travel by train because flying by Polish military jet could have been viewed by Russia as dangerously provocative, BBC Europe editor Katya Adler reports. It was not immediately clear when their train would make the return trip to Warsaw.

This is not good news on the face of it, but there’s a nugget of possible good news embedded in this story: the Russians have become careless enough or desperate enough to employ a thus-far totally secret “penetration aid” for their Iskander missiles that once in the hands of the West can ultimately be protected against.
From The New York Times:
American intelligence officials have discovered that the barrage of ballistic missiles Russia has fired into Ukraine contain a surprise: decoys that trick air-defense radars and fool heat-seeking missiles. ✂️ 
Each is packed with electronics and produces radio signals to jam or spoof enemy radars attempting to locate the Iskander-M, and contains a heat source to attract incoming missiles. …The use of the decoys may help explain why Ukrainian air-defense weapons have had difficulty intercepting Russia’s Iskander missiles. ✂️ 
“The minute people came up with missiles, people started trying to shoot them down, and the minute people started trying to shoot them down, people started thinking about penetration aids,” Jeffrey Lewis, a professor of nonproliferation at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, Calif., said in an interview. “But we never see them because they’re highly secret — if you know how they work, you can counteract them.” ✂️
“That suggests to me that the Russians place some value on keeping that technology close to home and that this war is important enough to them to give that up,” Mr. Lewis said. “They’re digging deep, and maybe they no longer care, but I would care if I were them.”

Shamelessly boosting my own diary here. I just want to make sure that you all see this and have the chance to pitch in.
www.dailykos.com/…
Mother Jones just sent this action opportunity in an email to their subscribers [on Monday]:
We have a chance to save the largest independent news site still operating in Russia, Meduza, that Putin is trying to shut down.
Really. We do. ✂️
Read Meduza’s letter to international supporters and become their newest member. I did, and countless people like you, here and abroad, are learning about this effort today and will hopefully do the same.
Meduza is a crowd-funded investigative newsroom that goes after abuses of power and corruption in Russia… Wisely, they have been preparing for a crackdown for years—packing their go bags, getting set up on servers outside Russia, and so on.
When Putin brought the hammer down, they all left the country and are now scattered across Europe, but they are determined to keep their reporting going. Their readers were prepared too, so despite the fact it’s been blocked, millions of Russians continue to access their independent journalism to find out what the Kremlin and state-run media will not tell them.
However, because of the sanctions and because it is now essentially a crime to support them as part of Putin’s clampdown on truth-tellers, they have lost virtually all their 30,000 supporters in Russia—their revenue dried up overnight, right at a time when their reporting is as essential as it ever will be. …
So right now, along with dozens of other independent newsrooms, our hope is to replace Meduza’s cut-off supporters in Russia with new supporters in Europe and the US. You can hear from Meduza and sign up as a supporter on their special page for US and European allies that just went live. ✂️
Learn more about what’s happening with Meduza and step in for a Russian reader who can no longer support them today. They literally are the only big Russian news organization that can report truthfully about the war right now—and be read by Russians in Russia.
Many thanks to petulans for finding this page that allows you to use PayPal: support.meduza.io/…
Okay, Daily Kos community, let’s pitch in to help bring Russians the truth about what’s happening in Ukraine. This couldn’t be more important.
And in more good news about spreading the truth:
From The New York Times:
To make our journalism more accessible to readers around the world, The New York Times has launched a new, dedicated channel on Telegram, a messaging platform with more than half a billion active users.
This Telegram channel delivers reporting on the war from our continuous live blog, where Times journalists are providing witness accounts, interviews and breaking news from the conflict.
Any Telegram user can subscribe to the @nytimes channel at https://t.me/nytimes.
We’re also helping readers follow the invasion through maps, daily newsletter updates and news alerts.
And this:
From Positive News:
The BBC has revived shortwave radio to deliver news about the war in Ukraine to Russian people, whose access to independent reporting has been restricted by the state.
Last week, the BBC announced that visits to its Russian language news site had more than trebled since the invasion of Ukraine. Days later, access was restricted to the site, along with other western news outlets.
In response, the corporation has started broadcasting on shortwave radio again. The BBC said its bulletins “can be received clearly in Kyiv and parts of Russia”.
Also this:
The Russian relatives of many people in Ukraine refuse to believe that Russia is bombing Ukrainians, and meanwhile Russian mothers are frantic for news of their soldier sons whom they believed were simply participating in military exercises. This ad is attempting to bring the truth to both groups in Russia.
BTW, Russian military mothers apparently have a lot of political power because of their ability to sway public opinion. So this campaign could do a lot of good.
From Fast Company:
This is now the challenge facing Kyiv-based creative ad agency Bickerstaff. Over the past two weeks, the small, award-winning agency has transitioned from commercial clients to government communications. It’s part of a wider group of advertising agencies that have turned their communications capabilities toward the information war that has become so central to this conflict.
Bickerstaff’s newest work is aimed at getting the truth to Russian military families. …The new campaign includes a spot called “To Russian Mothers,” which is a letter home from the perspective of a Russian soldier. It features images of airstrikes on civilian targets, the names and photos of captured Russian soldiers, and a call for mothers to ask their sons to surrender. It ends with a link to a site created by the Ukrainian government to find more information on captured and killed Russian soldiers.

Sometimes the best news is the fact that smart people are providing truly insightful commentary about complex issues. The first article below is from a brilliant interview by New Yorker editor David Remnick of scholar Stephen Kotkin. It’s definitely worth clicking the link and reading it in full.
The Weakness of the Despot
From The New Yorker:
The problem with [George Kennan’s and John Mearsheimer’s] argument is that it assumes that, had NATO not expanded, Russia wouldn’t be the same or very likely close to what it is today. … Way before NATO existed—in the nineteenth century—Russia looked like this: it had an autocrat. It had repression. It had militarism. It had suspicion of foreigners and the West. This is a Russia that we know, and it’s not a Russia that arrived yesterday or in the nineteen-nineties. It’s not a response to the actions of the West. …
I would even go further. I would say that NATO expansion has put us in a better place to deal with this historical pattern in Russia that we’re seeing again today. Where would we be now if Poland or the Baltic states were not in NATO? … In fact, Poland’s membership in NATO stiffened NATO’s spine. ✂️
…we think, but we don’t know, that [Putin] is not getting the full gamut of information. He’s getting what he wants to hear. In any case, he believes that he’s superior and smarter. This is the problem of despotism. It’s why despotism, or even just authoritarianism, is all-powerful and brittle at the same time. Despotism creates the circumstances of its own undermining. The information gets worse. The sycophants get greater in number. The corrective mechanisms become fewer. And the mistakes become much more consequential. ✂️
This is the thing about authoritarian regimes: they’re terrible at everything. They can’t feed their people. They can’t provide security for their people. They can’t educate their people. But they only have to be good at one thing to survive. If they can deny political alternatives, if they can force all opposition into exile or prison, they can survive, no matter how incompetent or corrupt or terrible they are. ✂️
[The Biden administration has] done much better than we anticipated based upon what we saw in Afghanistan and the botched run-up on the deal to sell nuclear submarines to the Australians. They’ve learned from their mistakes. That’s the thing about the United States. We have corrective mechanisms. We can learn from our mistakes. We have a political system that punishes mistakes. We have strong institutions. We have a powerful society, a powerful and free media. Administrations that perform badly can learn and get better, which is not the case in Russia or in China. It’s an advantage that we can’t forget.

Uncanny predictions of Ukraine’s war from April 2021 by former Russian MP Alexander Nevzorov
🎩 WineRev from a comment on Wednesday, March 9th. At the time WineRev mentioned this, it was available only on Reddit. Now it’s on YouTube. Do watch it — it will illuminate the inevitable fate of Russia better than anything else you’ll see, and it comes from a genuine insider.

There are now many, many organizations doing heroic work on the ground for Ukrainians. DKos’s own fundraising initiative supports Americares, The International Rescue Committee, World Central Kitchen, The International Fund for Animal Welfare, Save the Children’s Ukraine Crisis Relief Fund, and Razom for Ukraine, all of whom provide hands-on assistance, either directly or in collaboration with smaller partners. Donating through this link is a quick and easy way to do a lot of good.
Aside from the obvious necessity for a NATO summit at this moment, Biden attending in person sends a very strong message to Putin that the U.S. is serious about its commitment to NATO and especially to Article 5 — an attack on one is an attack on all. We have to hope that this will deter him from attacking the NATO nations adjoining Ukraine.
From The Washington Post:
President Biden will travel to Europe next week to meet with European leaders for a NATO summit, the White House announced as Russia continues its invasion in Ukraine. Biden will participate in a March 24 summit at NATO headquarters in Belgium on “Russia’s unprovoked and unjustified attack on Ukraine,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Tuesday.

Of course, the need to avoid a shutdown and to get money to Ukraine forced bipartisanship on this, so no one assumes it will continue. That said, it’s nice to see Congress get something done. 
From The Hill:
The Senate passed a massive bill to fund the government and provide new Ukraine-related aid, sending the 2,741-page bill to President Biden’s desk.
Senators voted 68-31 on the bill, which includes $1.5 trillion in government funding and $13.6 billion in aid tied to Ukraine.
The bill moved at lightning speed through Congress, passing the House less than 24 hours after it was unveiled early Wednesday morning. The Senate’s vote comes less than two days after the bill was introduced.
The Senate also passed by voice vote a days-long continuing resolution to buy time to get the massive legislation, which funds the government through the end of September, to Biden’s desk, after which he’s expected to sign it.
“It’s been a very productive and very bipartisan week in the Senate,” Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said.
“This bipartisan funding package is a significant and far-reaching win for the American people and I’m glad the Senate moved as quickly today as I hoped we would. To my colleagues on both sides of the aisle I say bravo, a job well done,” Schumer added.
All of the 31 “no” votes came from Republicans. But top GOP leaders, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), backed the bill.

And widespread dislike of the twice-yearly time switch has brought another moment of bipartisan unity:
From The Hill:
The Senate on Tuesday approved a proposal to make daylight saving time permanent, which if passed in the House and signed by President Biden, would mean Americans would never again have to set their clocks back an hour and lose an hour of afternoon daylight in the fall and winter.
If enacted into law, it would also mean that early risers lose an hour of daylight in the mornings in November, December, January and February.
These are wall paintings from around the world. I’ve selected just a few, but do click the link to see all of them.
From Bored Panda:

From KGW:
“I was blessed with opportunity where education even showed me…the things that I need to change,” [said convicted felon Darryl Robinson].
Robinson graduated from Bard College in 2015 with an anthropology degree thanks to the Bard Prison Initiative, where inmates have the opportunity to take rigorous college courses.  Portland State has a similar program.
“They’re really a leader in this work and model that we have much respect for and have tried to follow and replicate here at PSU,” said Deb Arthur, director of the PSU Higher Ed in Prison Program. Arthur is a former criminal defense lawyer. “It’s more than just a nice thing to offer them,” she said. “These are going to be changemakers. There’s brilliant folks inside and we cannot write them off.”
The PSU program is in its third year. It just received $120,000 to help incarcerated students access Pell grants.
“We’re developing a degree pathway in liberal studies for students at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility, which is Oregon’s only Prison for Women. We have about 75 students and we’ve offered 16 courses so far,” Arthur said. ✂️ 
Robinson’s college opportunity behind bars included being part of a debate team which competed against and beat a team [from] Harvard. “That moment,” he said, “was a culmination for us of proof that we belong in society.”
From The L.A. Times:
California’s spiraling housing crisis is often understood through the lens of its big cities, where the sheer number of people who need assistance can quickly capsize the programs designed to move people into housing. But before the pandemic, helping people find shelter in Del Norte had been an insurmountable problem for [Heather] Snow [the county’s director of health and human services] and her colleagues, as well.
There’s not enough housing in general in Del Norte, let alone for people with precarious finances. Snow lived 30 minutes north, in Brookings, Oregon, when she started her job six years ago. It took years to find somewhere closer to live. And there’s never been a homeless shelter anywhere in the county, as far as she knows. ✂️
In October 2020, the state awarded Del Norte County $2.4 million to buy [a] 30-room [local] motel and turn it into affordable housing through Project Homekey, a statewide initiative spearheaded by Gov. Gavin Newsom to help counties buy old motels and other buildings and turn them into permanent housing. Snow said there’s enough space to accommodate about 17% of Del Norte County’s homeless residents and families. ✂️ 
Today, the 30 motel rooms in Del Norte are among the more than 7,000 new housing units the state says it has created through Project Homekey in two years. In late January, the Newsom administration announced that an additional $14 billion will be spent in 2022 on a mix of housing units and mental health treatment.

From The Washington Post:
[There is] a bold experiment unfolding in Boston with echoes around the country. Michelle Wu, the city’s newly elected mayor, has made free public transportation a rallying cry and a personal mission, calling it a tool for social justice and tackling climate change.
Earlier this month, Boston took a small step toward what Wu hopes will be a far larger goal. Three heavily used bus lines that run through the heart of predominantly Black neighborhoods will be fare free for the next two years in a pilot program the city is closely studying.
“This is part of our legacy as a city, to truly invest in the ways that our futures are interconnected,” Wu said in an interview. “If we are serious about climate justice and racial equity and mobility, then removing barriers to public transportation … would be a major step forward.”
Boston isn’t the only place experimenting with free public transportation. More than two years into the coronavirus pandemic, the concept is having a moment across the United States, thanks partly to federal recovery funds and a desire to lure back passengers. Nationwide, ridership remains just 63 percent of pre-pandemic levels, according to the American Public Transportation Association (APTA).

One of the sweetest stories of the year so far. 
From CBSNews:
West Side Elementary School [in Healdsburg, CA]  is offering all the inspiration you’ll ever need. With help from two art teachers, its students have created a free telephone hotline where callers get unscripted, motivational messages.
“Hi, welcome to Peptoc, a public art project by West Side school. If you’re feeling mad, frustrated or nervous, press 1,” the hotline says. Among the joyful suggestions: “If you’re nervous, go get your wallet and spend it on ice cream and shoes!”
Whatever your worry, they have a solution. ✂️ 

The hotline is the brainchild of teachers Asherah Weiss and Jessica Martin, who thought family and friends might enjoy calling the number. They couldn’t have imagined what happened. Peptoc is now getting up to 9,000 calls per hour — roughly half a million calls total and counting.
The phone number? 707-998-8410. BTW, they’re currently getting free phone service but will soon have to start paying to keep the hotline open. If you’d like to help keep Peptoc going, go to their GoFundMe page at www.gofundme.com/… 

From The Washington Post:

Cousins and Ukrainian refugees Lesia Orshoko and Alona Chugai are among the millions who are running for their lives as Russian forces invade their country. But in a wartime twist of fate, the cousins landed in Israel last week to a friendly face — someone who was repaying a decades-old kindness. 
The friendly face was Sharon Bass, whose Jewish grandmother was sheltered and saved by Lesia’s grandmother in Ukraine during the Holocaust.
Sharon said it was her honor to take in the cousins and return the immeasurable kindness from nearly 80 years ago.
It felt like history repeating itself, she said. But in this case, it’s an inversion of the norm. Jews have been persecuted throughout our entire history. We’ve been killed, kicked out or forced to flee from every country we’ve stayed in long enough. But this time we have the privilege and responsibility of being a safe haven for other fleeing refugees.

From The Week:
Over 100,000 people and organisations from across the UK have registered on the new Homes for Ukraine online platform offering rent-free accommodation to Ukrainians fleeing the war zone with Russia on Tuesday, just a day after it was launched by the British government.
   Prime Minister Boris Johnson welcomed the “fantastic” response to the new scheme, which offers the British public 350-pound a month tax-free for housing Ukrainian refugees for a minimum of six months. ✂️
The scheme was announced in the House of Commons on Monday by UK Housing and Communities Secretary Michael Gove, who said the new route draws on the “enormous goodwill and generosity of the British public”, and Britain’s history of supporting the vulnerable in their hour of need.
   “We took in refugees fleeing Hitler’s Germany, those fleeing repression in Idi Amin’s Uganda and of course those who fled the atrocities of the Balkan wars. More recently we have offered support to those fleeing persecution in Syria, Afghanistan and Hong Kong. And we’re doing so again with Homes for Ukraine,” Gove said in Parliament.
   Under the sponsorship scheme, individuals acting as sponsors will be able to nominate a named Ukrainian individual or family to stay with them rent-free in their home, or in a separate property. Sponsors won’t be required to know them in advance – they might find them through posts on social media or otherwise.
   There will be no limit on the number of refugees who can come to the UK through this route, and they will be given three years leave to remain in the country, with the right to work and access public services.
The Kyiv Symphony Orchestra performing in Maidan Square. Note that they close with the “Hymn to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which is also a hymn to peace.
From Good News Network:
A couple of years ago, a woman named Joy Milne made headlines when scientists discovered that she could “smell” Parkinson’s disease on people with the neurodegenerative disorder. Since then, researchers have been trying to build devices that could diagnose the disease through odor compounds on the skin.
Now, researchers reporting in ACS Omega have developed a portable, artificially intelligent olfactory system, or “e-nose,” that could someday diagnose the disease in a doctor’s office.
Parkinson’s disease (PD) causes motor symptoms, such as tremors, rigidity, and trouble walking, as well as non-motor symptoms, including depression and dementia. Although there’s no cure, early diagnosis and treatment can improve one’s quality of life, relieve symptoms and prolong survival. However, the disease usually isn’t identified until patients develop motor symptoms, and by that time, they’ve already experienced irreversible neuron loss.
Recently, scientists discovered that people with PD secrete increased sebum (an oily, waxy substance produced by the skin’s sebaceous glands), along with increased production of yeast, enzymes, and hormones, which combine to produce certain odors.
Human “super smellers” like Milne are very rare; she first caught scent of the disease’s “musky, oily odor” when she smelled it on her now-late husband Les. 12 years after she first detected the smell, as GNN reported, he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s at the age of 45.
From Good News Network:
As physicists work in the nuclear fusion sector to unlock limitless clean energy through harnessing the power of the sun, they inadvertently invented a tool that could allow geothermal plants to deliver limitless clean energy by harnessing the power of the Earth. That tool is a large millimeter-wave laser drill that will allow engineers to bore down more than 12.4 miles (20 km) into the Earth’s crust to harness the heat from the planet’s core.
Another link to nuclear fusion is that this laser drilling technology is being pioneered by a spin-off company called Quaise from MIT who also run a nuclear fusion reactor in Massachusetts. The bottom line is that this idea is not science fiction, and Quaise has the money to put several full-scale demonstration machines into action by 2024, and hopes to have a 100- megawatt supercritical geothermal plant in operation by 2026.
At 12.4 miles into the Earth’s crust, temperatures soar to 500°C, a sector-redefining level compared to traditional drill bit borehole temperatures of around 200°C. At this stage and depth, water under the ground becomes “supercritical,” a state of matter where it’s neither a gas nor a liquid. ✂️
Their next planned step may be the greatest recycling trick in the industry. As coal-fired power plants continue to be shuttered around the world, their giant, already established infrastructure for converting steam into electricity, large electricity distribution equipment, and talented workforce could simply be taken over by Quaise, who could merely replace the coal-fired components with those meant for harnessing supercritical water. “There are somewhere upwards of 8,500 coal-fired power plants around the world, totaling over 2,000 gigawatts of capacity, and they’ll all have to find something else to do by 2050,” writes Loz Blain at New Atlas. ✂️
At 12-15 miles below the Earth’s surface, it doesn’t matter where the drill or ex-coal plant is located, the heat will be pretty much the same.

I’m sure you’ve seen this news, but if you haven’t seen the stunning video, here it is:

From Good News Network:
Using a unique hydrogel, scientists in Saudi Arabia have successfully drawn water out of the dry air for growing spinach—while producing electricity from the solar panels that power it all.
The system offers a sustainable, low-cost strategy to improve food and water security for people living in dry-climate regions.
“A fraction of the world’s population still doesn’t have access to clean water or green power, and many of them live in rural areas with arid or semi-arid climate,” says Peng Wang, a professor of environmental science and engineering at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. “Our design makes water out of air using clean energy that would’ve been wasted and is suitable for decentralized, small-scale farms in remote places like deserts and oceanic islands.”
The system, called WEC2P, is composed of a solar photovoltaic panel placed atop a layer of hydrogel, which is mounted on top of a large metal box to condense and collect water. Wang and his team developed the hydrogel in their prior research—a material that can effectively absorb water vapor from ambient air and release the water content when heated.
The researchers used the waste heat from solar panels when generating electricity to drive absorbed water out of the hydrogel. The metal box below collects the vapor and condenses the gas into water.Additionally, the hydrogel increases the efficiency of solar photovoltaic panels by as much as 9% because it absorbs the heat and lowers the panels’ temperature.

From PR Newswire:
Green Hydrogen International (GHI) has unveiled plans to create the world’s largest green hydrogen production and storage hub in South Texas.
Hydrogen City, Texas will be an integrated green hydrogen production, storage, and transport hub growing to 60GW in size and producing over 2.5 billion kilograms of green hydrogen per year. The project is centered around a hydrogen storage facility in the Piedras Pintas Salt Dome located in Duval County. Pipelines will deliver the green hydrogen to Corpus Christi and Brownsville where it will be turned into green ammonia, sustainable aviation fuel and other products, or delivered by pipeline directly to hydrogen power plants and other users around the state.
The project will be powered by 60GW of [?] behind the meter solar and wind power with additional renewable energy drawn from the ERCOT grid during periods of low prices.
“Hydrogen City is a massive, world class undertaking that will put Texas on the map as a leading green hydrogen producer. Texas has been the world leader in energy innovation for over 100 years and this project is intended to cement that leadership for the next century and beyond,” says GHI’s founder and CEO Brian Maxwell.
If you read niftywriter’s superb GNR yesterday, I hope you watched the commentary by Beau of the Fifth Column on the need to remain positive. This video of a little girl in a shelter singing “Let it Go” in Ukrainian was at the center of Beau’s commentary, and I thought you all should see it:

And in news that came as a great relief to everyone who’d been moved by this video, she has reached safety in Poland.
From Metro UK:
Amelia Anisovych, 7, is finally in Poland after struggling through a gruelling two-day journey with her gran and brother Misha.
The ‘sweet angel’ went viral for her performance of the Frozen tune during a ‘terrifying’ week-long stay in a Kyiv bunker.
Proud mum Lilia Anisovych has said her daughter ‘sang as the voice of all the children of Ukraine’.
‘I am very glad that the whole world heard my daughter’, she said. ‘She sang as the voice of all the children of Ukraine. We hope to be heard in all parts of the world.
Brought to you by Rosy, Nora, and Rascal.
🎩 to Getting1, in a comment last Wednesday. Rosy wanted me to repeat it because it’s such good news. Thanks and wags, Getting1!
From News7Boston:
For patients suffering from pain in the emergency room, just 10 minutes with a four-legged friend may help reduce pain, according to a study published Wednesday.
The results support what dog lovers everywhere have long suspected — canine affection cures all ills — as well as provides a bit of optimism for patients and health care providers frequently grappling with strapped hospital resources in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“There is research showing that pets are an important part of our health in different ways. They motivate us, they get us up, (give us) routines, the human-animal bond,” said lead study author Colleen Dell, the research chair in One Health and Wellness and professor at the University of Saskatchewan.
The study, published in the journal PLOS One, asked more than 200 patients in the emergency room to report their level of pain on a scale from 1 to 10 (with 10 as the highest level of pain). A control group had no intervention for their pain, while participants in the other group were given 10 minutes of time with a therapy dog, and patients rated their pain levels again, according to the study.
Those who got the visit from the dogs reported less pain.
And because this image touched me so deeply, here it is again, 🎩 to cc (chloris creator). What our animal friends mean to us is incalculable.
This Ukrainian woman carried her old dog for 17km to cross the border with her. 🇺🇦 pic.twitter.com/wCthUAjqyw

Nora finds this completely unsurprising, since she’s such a fierce predator herself [in her own mind 😉].
From The Independent (UK):
Cats evolved from a fierce sabre-toothed predator that prowled North America 42 million years ago, according to new research.
The new species was among the first mammals to have an exclusively meat-based diet.
It was twice as big as an average housecat – and could have taken down rhinoceroses, camels, tapirs, pigs and horses. 
Lead author Dr Ashley Poust, of Dan Diego Natural History Museum, said: “Today the ability to eat an all-meat diet, also called hypercarnivory, isn’t uncommon. … But 42 million years ago, mammals were only just figuring out how to survive on meat alone. One big advance was to evolve specialised teeth for slicing flesh – which is something we see in this newly described specimen.” 
Its lower jaw and well-preserved teeth were unearthed at a fossil site in San Diego, southern California, west of the Rocky Mountains.

Rascal applauds these magpies, and assures me that he could easily have figured out how to get those harnesses off. What are sharp beaks for, right??
From Good News Network:
Australian ornithologists have stumbled upon an extremely rare cognitive ability in magpies [since] fitting five of the birds with little backpack tracking devices.
Demonstrating a mix of rescue behavior/altruism and clever problem solving, the magpies saw their friends had a strange metal parasite on them, and within hours the group had cut them free from almost all of the trackers.
Australian magpies live in social groups of up to 12 individuals. They display group behavior through things like defending their territory with swooping, and through sharing child-rearing responsibilities with their siblings.
When Dominique Potvin, Senior Lecturer in Animal Ecology at the University of the Sunshine Coast, came up with the unique harness design for her team’s GPS trackers, she was excited to gather data and learn how far magpies travel, whether they have patterns or schedules throughout the day in terms of movement and socializing, and if age, sex, or dominance rank affected their activities.
“Within ten minutes of fitting the final tracker, we witnessed an adult female without a tracker working with her bill to try and remove the harness off of a younger bird,” said Potvin in The Conservation, noting in adifferent sort of study than she planned to write that they figured out to target the only weak point in the harnesses’ design.
We’re all familiar with the transformation of the pain of war into art in Picasso’s “Guernica,” but this brilliant Ukrainian artist/storyteller has found a unique way to do the same thing. This performance was about WWII and was posted on YouTube in 2009, but of course it has fresh poignancy now. The words she writes at the end translate as “You’re always near.”

A tip of the hat to 2thanks for creating this handy info sheet for all Gnusies new and old!
Morning Good News Roundups at 7 x 7: These Gnusies lead the herd at 7 a.m. ET, 7 days a week: 
hpg posts Evening Shade diaries at 7:30 p.m. ET every day! After a long day, Gnusies meet in the evening shade and continue sharing Good News, good community, and good actions. In the words of NotNowNotEver: “hpg ably continues the tradition of Evening Shade.” Find Evening Shades here.
oldhippiedude posts Tweets of the Week on Sundays at 6:00 p.m. Central Time — New time! Our second evening Gnusie hangout zone! In search of a TOTW diary? Look here or here.
For more information about the Good News group, please see our detailed Welcoming comment, one of the first comments in our morning diaries.
The following invaluable list was put together by chloris creator:
Indivisible has created a Truth Brigade to push back against the lies.

Propaganda, false characterizations, intentionally misleading messages, and outright lies threaten our democracy and even our lives. We can effectively combat disinformation, despite the well-funded machines that drive it. They may have money, but we have truth and we have people.People believe sources they trust.When we share and amplify unified, factual messages to those who trust us, we shift the narrative. When we do this by the thousands–we’re part of the Indivisible Truth Brigade, and we get our country back. Join us.️
Our own Mokurai is a member. You can see all of the diaries in the Truth Brigade group on DK here.

From GoodNewsRoundup (aka Goodie):
Most important: DON’T LOSE HOPE.  This is a giant and important fight for us but, win or lose, we keep fighting and voting and organizing and spreading truth and light.  We never give up.

And I’ll add a recommendation for you to check out Activate America (formerly Flip the West), which is recruiting people to send postcards or letters to Dem voters to encourage them to sign up to vote, especially to vote early or vote by mail. 
The 20th century’s greatest cellist, Pablo Casals (Pau Casals in his native Catalan), adopted this Catalan Christmas carol as an anthem of peace. May peace return soon to Ukraine! 

I’ll give the final word to poet W.H. Auden. This is the conclusion of his poem “September 1, 1939”, the day Hitler invaded Poland:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Thanks to all of you for your smarts, your hearts, and
your faithful attendance at our daily Gathering of the Herd.

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