Americans Who Took-in Stranded Koreans During Christmas Blizzard Just Flew Over the Ocean to Visit Their House

During the record-setting blizzard in New York state last winter, a tour bus of South Korean visitors to our shores found hospitality with two locals—the Campagnas—when their bus got stuck in the snow in Buffalo.

Staying two nights, snow plows eventually had the Koreans on their way. Now, 5 months later, they’re getting the chance to return the favor.

Fascinated by Korean culture, stemming from a love of Korean food, Alex and Andrea Campagna are now in South Korea on a vacation to keep the fire of that memorable snow day alive.

“To see everyone in Korea again is such a blessing,” Andrea told reporters in Seoul on Sunday. She and her husband arrived on Saturday at the invitation of the Korea Tourism Organization.

The organization wasn’t the only one who wanted to thank Alex for the cross-Pacific act of kindness, because when the story went viral on social media following reporting from The New York Times and Good News Network, many Korean businesses wanted to reward the couple.

“They made us really feel at home. After our memorable time together, I thought I should do good deeds for others too,” said Scott Park, one of the tour group who the Campagnas went to see, and who turned for to their interview.

One of the fonder memories was all the Korean food cooked by the sheltering tourists after discovering a wealth of authentic Korean ingredients and crockery in the Campagna household.

MORE CROSS-CULTURAL FRIENDSHIP: Wife of WWII Soldier Spends Decades to Reunite Japanese Family With Photo Album He Found on Okinawa –LOOK

“I think with how difficult things have been with COVID, after so much sadness, pain and losses, the world was hungry for a heartwarming story. I think that’s why the story resonated with so many people,” Andrea told the Korea Herald.

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A Warthog, Hyena, and a Porcupine Walked into a Hole–and Decided to Live Together

So a porcupine, a hyena, and a warthog walk into a burrow…

No, it’s not the setup to a bad joke, but the abstract in a scientific paper published in the African Journal of Ecology which found they all were able to co-habit the burrow.

Despite the cramped confines of the dug-out den being flush with quills, teeth, and tusks, no blood was spilled on the pages of this rental agreement.

In fact, the scientists, who discovered this novel phenomenon while observing camera traps outside hyena dens in a wildlife preserve in Kenya, suggest that it was, in fact, a “healthy respect for the threats presented by their mutually formidable weaponry.”

Den-sharing isn’t completely novel, it has been observed among porcupines, pine martens, foxes, and badgers in the same hill-burrow complex in Italy in 2019.

However, this is the first time it’s been seen in African animals. In one of the hollows could be found up to, seven hyenas, three warthogs, and two porcupines, and in another, 11 hyenas, six warthogs, and two porcupines.

They shared the space for months, and would sometimes come and go within minutes of each other.

“Hyenas and porcupines are mostly nocturnal, and warthogs are mostly diurnal, so shared dens could be occupied on a ‘time-share’ basis,” researchers said, who stipulated however that there was evidence of all three staying in the burrow at the same time.

Though the scientists didn’t confirm their existence, potentially-separate chambers under the ground likely gave the trio much-needed space, making them more like neighbors than roommates.

The prevailing theory, according to lead author Marc Dupuis-Désormeaux et al, is that during the dry season, the very hard earth made it economical to utilize existing burrows rather than expend energy digging new ones. When the rains returned, the rental agreement seemed to have ended, and the members went their separate ways.

MORE ANIMAL NEWS: 65 Different Species of Animals Laugh, Says a New Study

Interestingly, the hyenas burrowing with porcupines and warthogs seemed to entirely refrain from hunting these species, while other hyenas in burrows not occupied by the other animals, continued to do so.

It’s certainly a line of inquiry that deserves more attention.

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This Gel Stops Brain Tumors After Surgery, Offering Hope for Glioblastoma Cancer Patients

Medication delivered by a novel gel cured 100% of mice with an aggressive brain cancer, a striking result that offers new hope for patients diagnosed with glioblastoma, one of the deadliest and most common brain tumors in humans.

“We think this hydrogel will be the future,” said study leader Professor Honggang Cui of Johns Hopkins University.

Cui’s team combined an anticancer drug and an antibody in a solution that self-assembles into a gel to fill the tiny grooves left after a brain tumor is surgically removed.

The gel can reach areas that surgery might miss and current drugs struggle to reach to kill lingering cancer cells and suppress tumor growth.

The gel also seems to trigger an immune response that a mouse’s body struggles to activate on its own when fighting glioblastoma.

When the researchers re-challenged surviving mice with a new glioblastoma tumor, their immune systems alone beat the cancer without additional medication. The gel appears to not only fend off cancer but help rewire the immune system to discourage recurrence with immunological memory, researchers said.

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Still, surgery is essential for this approach, the researchers said. Applying the gel directly in the brain without surgical removal of the tumor resulted in just a 50% survival rate.

“The surgery likely alleviates some of that pressure and allows more time for the gel to activate the immune system to fight the cancer cells,” Prof. Cui said.

The gel solution consists of nano-sized filaments made with paclitaxel, an FDA-approved drug for breast, lung, and other cancers. The filaments provided a vehicle to deliver the antibody called aCD47. By blanketing the tumor cavity evenly, the gel releases medication steadily over several weeks, and its active ingredients remain close to the injection site.

By using that specific antibody, the team is trying to overcome one of the toughest hurdles in glioblastoma research. It targets macrophages, a type of cell that sometimes supports immunity but other times protects cancer cells, allowing aggressive tumor growth.

MORE WINS: New Brain Cancer Immunotherapy Shows Promise in Human Trial – Most Patients Saw No Tumor Growth

The results are published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

One of the go-to therapies for glioblastoma is a wafer co-developed by a team of researchers at Johns Hopkins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1990s, commercially known as Gliadel. It is an FDA-approved, biodegradable polymer that also delivers medication into the brain after surgical tumor removal.

Gliadel showed significant survival rates in laboratory experiments, but the results achieved with the new gel are some of the most impressive the Johns Hopkins team has seen, said Betty Tyler, a co-author and associate professor of neurosurgery at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine who played a pivotal role in the development of Gliadel.

“We don’t usually see 100% survival in mouse models of this disease,” Tyler said. “Thinking that there is potential for this new hydrogel combination to change that survival curve for glioblastoma patients is very exciting.”

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The new gel offers hope for future glioblastoma treatment because it integrates anticancer drugs and antibodies, a combination of therapies researchers say is difficult to administer simultaneously because of the molecular composition of the ingredients.

“The gel is implanted at the time of tumor resection, which makes it work really well,” Tyler said.

The challenge now is to translate the gel’s results in the lab into therapies with substantial clinical impacts.

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Woman’s Life Saved After Her Dog Found a Kidney Donor at the Beach: One-in-22 Million Odds

In an absolutely jaw-dropping change of fortune, a Welshwoman with late-stage renal failure met a kidney donor on the beach who happened to be a perfect match.

44-year-old Lucy Humphrey from Caerphilly has lived her whole adult life with lupus, but it was in 2017 that she heard from her doctors that if she couldn’t find a new kidney in 5-year’s time, there was a chance she would die.

Requiring kidney dialysis, Humphrey and her partner Cenydd Owen had to cancel their campervan holiday, and so decided to drive it instead to the beach to have a barbeque.

While they were there, one of their two Dobermans, a big lug called Indie, kept running over to another camper to pester her while she was crocheting. By the third time, Owen went over to apologize.

There were no hard feelings between the camper, 40-year-old Katie James, and Indie, and in fact she was soon over at the barbeque chatting with Humphrey.

It was there James learned that Humphrey needed a kidney. She spoke up to mention that she had just joined the kidney donation register and offered to swap phone numbers.

“And to be honest I didn’t think anything else would come of it,” Humphrey remarked to the Daily Record.

MORE INSPIRING STORIES: Inspired By Daughter’s Life-Saving Kidney Donor, Father Returns the Favor and Becomes a Donor

However, blood tests later revealed the two campers were a perfect match, something which Humphrey described as a 1-in-22 million chance. The transplant took place in October of 2022, after which Humphrey needed 4 weeks to be discharged from the hospital due to James’ donated kidney not “waking up” fast enough.

After that, she could finally go on that campervan holiday, have a drink with dinner, and do many more activities besides.

MORE WELSH NEWS: Wales is Building a National Forest That Will Span the Length and Breadth of the Country

“I’m so grateful for her… I told my partner in 2019 if I didn’t find a transplant within five years it was possible something would happen and I would die,” said Humphrey. “I want this to be a message to other people not to give up hope.”

James said when she first signed up she was told she wouldn’t receive any information on what her donated kidney would accomplish—whether it saved a life or not, or even who it went to.

Like this, she not only knows for sure it saved a woman’s life, but it created a lasting friendship—proof of which lies in the smartphones of James, Humphrey, and Owen, where WhatsApp messages bear the address “The Kidney Gang” from the group chat they created.

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David Attenborough’s online Wild Isles isn’t too hard-hitting for TV – it doesn’t go far enough | Dave Goulson

It was with some trepidation that I began viewing the online-only episode of David Attenborough’s latest documentary series, Wild Isles. The episode, Saving Our Wild Isles, focuses on the threats facing British wildlife and those fighting to save it. Rumours…

Watch Heartwarming Reaction When Ukrainian Students Get Shocking News They Won Full College Scholarship in U.S

We bring you the uplifting moments when five students in war-torn Ukraine received the life-changing news that they will receive an all-expenses paid college education to study at a college in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, thanks to the incredible generosity of philanthropist Sam Rose. The retired lawyer and real-estate developer provided $2 million for scholarships to Dickinson […]

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Couple Stunned to Find Childhood Letter in Attic Written by King Charles to His ‘Granny’ the Queen Mother in 1955

We’ve all found family heirlooms and keepsakes tucked away in our attics and lofts before, but an English couple recently found a lot more than merely their parents’ third-grade arithmetic homework. A couple from Stratford-upon-Avod were left ‘gobsmacked’ after they found a childhood letter that newly-crowned King Charles wrote to his “Granny” Queen Mother Elizabeth […]

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Wife of WWII Soldier Spent Decades on Husband’s Wish to Reunite Japanese Family With Photo Album He Found on Okinawa

With persistence, belief, and the amount of sheer dumb luck normally needed to win the lottery, a Portland senior tracked down a Japanese family based on the photos left behind in an album her late husband plucked from the shrapnel-strewn beaches of Okinawa in 1945. Strangers, friends of friends, and non-English speakers all pitched in […]

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