Monday Night Feel Good News

Good Evening!! It’s a long weekend here in Massachusetts. Today is Patriots Day, which commemorates the beginning of the American Revolution on April 19, 1776. It’s also the day of the Boston Marathon, which I guess didn’t go so well since it was almost 90 degrees here. Anyway, in honor of the holiday, I thought I’d post some feel good news for a change.

I read a wonderfully touching story at BBC News yesterday that I just had to share. It’s about a little boy who got lost 26 years ago and how as an adult he was able to locate his mom using Google Earth.

Saroo was only five years old when he got lost. He was travelling with his older brother, working as a sweeper on India’s trains. “It was late at night. We got off the train, and I was so tired that I just took a seat at a train station, and I ended up falling asleep.”

That fateful nap would determine the rest of his life. “I thought my brother would come back and wake me up but when I awoke he was nowhere to be seen. I saw a train in front of me and thought he must be on that train. So I decided to get on it and hoped that I would meet my brother.”

Saroo did not meet his brother on the train. Instead, he fell asleep and had a shock when he woke up 14 hours later. Though he did not realise it at first, he had arrived in Calcutta, India’s third biggest city and notorious for its slums.

I can’t even imagine what that must have been like for a little five-year-old boy! But somehow Saroo found the courage and strength to survive on the street. He learned how to beg in order to survive–and how to keep himself safe. Eventually Saroo ended up in an orphanage and then was adopted by a couple from Australia.

It sounds like he was happy with his adoptive parents, but as he grew older Saroo had a strong urge to find his original family. He didn’t even know the name of the town where he was born so using his early childhood memories he searched Google Earth for familiar landmarks.

“I multiplied the time I was on the train, about 14 hours, with the speed of Indian trains and I came up with a rough distance, about 1,200km.”

He drew a circle on a map with its centre in Calcutta, with its radius about the distance he thought he had travelled. Incredibly, he soon discovered what he was looking for: Khandwa. “When I found it, I zoomed down and bang, it just came up. I navigated it all the way from the waterfall where I used to play.”

When he got to Khandwa, Saroo was able to use his memories to find his way to his childhood home; but when he got there he found the house abandoned. Fortunately neighbors remembered his family and were able to tell him where his mother lived and they were reunited.

The heartbreaking part of the story is that Saroo’s brother had been killed on that night in 1986, which explains why the five-year-old Saroo was left in the train station alone.

“A month after I had disappeared my brother was found in two pieces on a railway track.” His mother had never known whether foul play was involved or whether the boy had simply slipped and fallen under a train.

“We were extremely close and when I walked out of India the tearing thing for me was knowing that my older brother had passed away.”

Life is so strange sometimes.

Have you heard about the 750-pound cow that escaped from a slaughterhouse in Paterson, New Jersey and tore up the town?

The wild scene began shortly after 8 p.m. after the black-and-white cow apparently slipped away unnoticed from a slaughterhouse on River Street, [animal control officer John] De Cando said….

The cow ran up and down Presidential Boulevard, spent some time at a basketball court, then continued on River Street, crossing the Arch Street Bridge and wading into the Passaic River.

“It was like Dodge City,” De Cando said. “You had five police cars on one side of the street, five on the other and the 750-pound cow looking both ways. When the opportunity came, it booked between the police cars.”

De Cando finally got close enough to tranquilize the cow twice. The cow, which was trapped between a fire hydrant and a truck, began snoring as a crowd gathered.

I’m cheering for that cow. De Cando said the Slaughterhouse owner said he would take the cow to a farm instead of killing her; but an animal rights activist named Mike Stura decided to take matters into his own hands.

The brave cow who managed to escape from the perils of a Paterson, New Jersey slaughterhouse has found sanctuary and received a heartwarming bovine fairytale thanks to an upstate New York man.

Animal rights advocate Mike Stura rescued the 750-pound cow and guided it to a Woodstock, New York animal sanctuary where as Stura put, “He’ll never end up on someone’s plate, that’s for sure.”

That’s great, Mike, but I’m pretty sure the courageous cow is a “she,” not a “he.”

I’ve got one more heartwarming animal story. At least I found it heartwarming. On Friday, a Magellanic penguin at the St. Louis Zoo demonstrated its good taste by biting Newt Gingrich.

At least one penguin at the St. Louis Zoo appears to be a feisty opponent of Newt Gingrich.

The Republican presidential candidate is sporting a small bandage on his finger after getting nipped by a small penguin during his tour of the zoo on Friday. Gingrich was in St. Louis to speak during the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting.

Maybe that penguin is a supporter of gun control.

Finally, I love the story about the bit of sci-fi speculation by Robert Breslaw, “a very distinguished chemist at Columbia, a National Medal of Science winner, and former president of the American Chemical Society” (ACS).

Last week, the ACS sent out a press release that headlined: “Could ‘advanced’ dinosaurs rule other planets?” Whoever wrote the press release had pulled the headline from a humorous note from the end of Breslaw’s very serious scientific paper:

After suggesting that early meteorites may have seeded a pre-life earth with chiral amino acids, Dr. Robert Breslow ends this paper with this flight of fancy:

An 
implication 
from
 this 
work 
is 
that 
elsewhere 
in 
the 
universe 
there 
could 
be 
life 
forms 
based
 on 
D 
amino 
acids 
and 
L 
sugars, 
depending 
on 
the 
chirality 
of 
circular 
polarized
 light 
in
 that 
sector 
of 
the universe or 
whatever 
other 
process 
operated 
to 
favor 
the 
L
α‐methyl 
amino acids 
in 
the 
meteorites 
that 
have landed
 on Earth. 

Such 
life 
forms 
could 
well 
be 
advanced 
versions 
of 
dinosaurs, 
if 
mammals 
did 
not 
have the good
 fortune 
to 
have 
the 
dinosaurs 
wiped 
out 
by 
an 
asteroidal 
collision,
 as 
on 
Earth. 

We 
would 
be 
better 
off not 
meeting 
them.

All the science blogs are in an uproar about this, but I thought it was funny–and a great idea for a horror movie. Hey all you chemists out there–get a sense of humor, will you?

Have you heard any feel good news lately?