Seeking to preen and pamper its beaches ahead of the 2028 Summer Olympics, authorities in 2 Los Angeles districts needed to figure out how to get thousands of pounds of trash out of the LA and San Gabriel rivers. They turned to the best in class; a man who among those whose passion is cleaning […] The post Dutch Ocean Cleanup Folks Are Clearing LA’s Rivers of Trash in Time for 2028 Olympics appeared first on Good News Network.

People who live on the East and West coasts love to debate which side is best. They fight over whether it’s better to have all four seasons, as they do in the East, or to enjoy mild temperatures all year long in California. They also fight over personality differences. Is it better to be West Coast “nice” or East Coast “kind”? But the biggest East-versus-West beef must have been in the ‘90s, when the country debated which side had better hip-hop. Were you a fan of Jay-Z and Biggie in the East or Snoop and Tupac in the West?  Not to create more cross-country rivalries, but one debate that has flown under the radar is whose butter is better. Unless you’ve lived on both coasts, you probably don’t know that moving across the country may require a new butter dish. Apparently, it comes in different shapes on each coast. A butter dish company on Amazon has a map to show you whether you have “Elgin sticks” or “Western Stubbies”: East Coast versus West Coast butter. Credit: Casabella/Amazon What’s the difference between East Coast and West Coast butter? Both coasts buy butter in ¼-lb sticks, but East Coast butter is cut into longer sticks measuring 4 ¾” long and 1 ¼” high. Butter on the West Coast is cut stubbier, measuring 3 ⅛” long and 1 ½” high.  Did everyone know that west coast and east coast butter is packaged differently??Behold the “Western Stubby” vs the “Elgin Stick” pic.twitter.com/H2JYZtTWgM— Highway Jill (@lawngurl) October 13, 2024 The main difference is that the dairy industry began many years earlier on the East Coast than on the West. In the late 1890s, things became standardized when butter manufacturers began using the “Peters’ Package,” a cardboard box with wax paper inside to package their butter. Created for National Biscuit Company’s Uneeda Biscuits, creameries found the new packaging was much more appealing than buying balls of butter that were scooped into cheesecloth. At that time, people bought butter in one pound sticks. But in 1907, a Swift & Company creamery received a letter from its New Orleans unit stating that the chef of the Checker and Chess club “would like to be supplied with butter in ¼ pound prints which would enable him to slice off for table use without waste or delay.”  The new packaging caught on, and four ¼ sticks replaced the pound chunk. Butter on the East Coast was produced using a machine called the Elgin Butter Cutter, which standardized sizing. east coast/west coast butter yuri. is this anything pic.twitter.com/shvlsPzX56— anika (@memecatalog) February 18, 2025 The West Coast gets in on the butter game As people began to move to the West Coast, there wasn’t a lot of dairy production outside of liquid milk. But, as California grew to become the country’s largest dairy manufacturer, the Elgin machines were no longer available. So, California butter manufacturers used more modern equipment that cut butter into fatter sticks, known as “Western Stubbies.” People on both coasts have become accustomed to their own types of butter, and, in 2007, Land O’Lakes began producing longer and stubbier sticks to cater to different markets. In the grand scheme of the great East Coast versus West Coast rivalry, the shape of butter probably won’t lead to a civil war any time soon. But it’s charming to know that everyday staples can hold a bit of regional history. The post The big East versus West Coast debate we slept on: Whose butter is better? appeared first on Upworthy.

Maddje got the kind of email that makes your stomach drop: someone had logged into her account from a different device. Classic hack warning. She braced herself for the worst and went to check what damage had been done. What she found instead was that all of her AP Physics homework for the next few weeks had been completed. “I got an email that a different device had logged into my account, and when I went to check, all of my AP Physics homework for the next few weeks was done,” the text on her TikTok video read. She filmed herself (@maddje97 on TikTok) staring at the screen in disbelief, scrolling through assignment after assignment, every one of them marked as finished. @maddje97 who tf did my homework ♬ original sound – DarkHubris She had no idea who’d done it or how. She had no way to contact the mystery benefactor who’d apparently broken into her account for the sole purpose of grinding through her physics work. The video racked up nearly 35 million views and over 6.4 million likes from people who mostly wanted to know how they could get hacked like this. The comments turned into a surprisingly wholesome collection of similar stories. One person wrote, “One time, someone didn’t log off the Chromebook at school and I saw they had gotten an 80 on a Math Quiz, so I re-did it and let them have a 100, then just logged off.” Maddje replied that the person was “what’s good in this world.” A teen sits in front her of her computer wearing headphones. Photo credit: Canva Others were funnier. “This kept happening to me, but instead of doing my homework, they just kept changing my Chrome background to weird stuff like human Mike Wazowski,” one person said. Another shared a story about a stranger who somehow ended up on their family’s Netflix account: “There was a hacker on our Netflix account that watched ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ religiously, and my mum opened him a new profile. He’s still living in our account. We named him Gregory.” But the actual explanation turned out to be even better than a kindhearted hacker. The “hacker” was a girl named Sage Wilson @sagewilsondk on TikTok, who posted her own video (since removed) from the other side of the mix-up. “Logged in to do my Physics homework and I did it all under some random girl’s account!?” Wilson’s video read. A confused young woman in front of her computer. Photo credit: Canva She’d accidentally logged into Maddje’s account instead of her own, done the entire assignment without realizing it wasn’t hers, and only figured out the mistake afterward. Wilson reached out to ask Maddje to send the completed work back so she could copy-paste it into her own account, since, technically, she’d already done it. So, nobody got hacked. Two students just got tangled up in the same login system, and one of them did a stranger’s homework by accident. The Internet was a little disappointed there wasn’t a benevolent physics phantom out there breaking into accounts to spread completed assignments. But honestly, the real version is funnier. You can follow Maddje (@maddje97) TikTok for more entertainment and lifestyle content. The post Her account got hacked. The ‘hacker’ had finished weeks of her physics homework. appeared first on Upworthy.

LSD was created in the late 1930s, and its extreme psychedelic properties were discovered just a handful of years later. Almost immediately, the vivid dream-like hallucinatory effects on the brain were of great interest to scientists, who began studying it intensely. Early on, there were promising signs of LSD as a treatment for depression, anxiety, and even alcoholism. However, most research into hallucinogens like LSD, psilocybin, and DMT was shut down in the ’60s and ’70s as the substances were outlawed. It wasn’t until fairly recently that interest in the potential medicinal effects was reignited, and the last few years have yielded some truly amazing findings. New case study reveals effect of psilocybin, or magic mushrooms, on elderly Alzheimer’s patient A recent paper published in Frontiers in Neuroscience shares a remarkable story. The authors present the case of a Japanese-American woman in her 80s who had been living with symptoms of Alzheimer’s for a decade. Over the past five years, in particular, the severity of her illness had worsened dramatically. She could only speak monosyllabically, if at all, and shows flat affect—essentially, she was barely able to interact at all, even with close loved ones. It’s a state many families are sadly familiar with. Alzheimer’s is a heartbreaking disease that not only steals so much from the person afflicted, but isolates them from friends and family. It becomes almost impossible for loved ones to connect or share in activities with a person with severe Alzheimer’s. Quite often, Alzheimer’s patients don’t even remember their own children or spouses. With little left to lose, a physician decided to try a treatment of psilocybin, also known as magic mushrooms. Psilocybin mushrooms are showing promising therapeutic effects. Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons Remarkable results 19 hours after taking psilocybin The woman was given five grams of a mushroom strain called Enigma, known for being extremely potent. Five grams is also considered a high dose, in general. According to PAB Counseling, five grams can result in a “complete disconnect from consensus reality,” and powerful hallucinations that can be “overwhelming, perhaps bizarre, and indescribable.” For many hours after the woman took her dose, she was in what the authors call a deep sleep. She was sweating and developed a fever. But at about the 19 hour mark, she became lucid again, and something incredible happened: She began talking. According to the published paper, she talked for hours, recalling details from her life in “autobiographical conversation.” Not only that, but the effects lasted for days. Her working memory returned. She began smiling and sustaining eye contact. Even her physical symptoms alleviated, and she was able to control her bladder, regain motor control, dress herself, and showed improved alertness for weeks after. A month later, she took another dose The woman took a smaller dose in the second supervised session, but once again experienced miraculous improvement, including “greater verbal expressivity, improved facial mimicry, spontaneous humor, emotionally valenced autobiographical imagery, and increased agility while walking.” She was even documented saying: “It is pleasant to come here” and describing a vision of surfing on a beach with her son. The presence of spontaneous humor in the woman who, before, could barely speak is pretty incredible. Alzheimer’s takes a serious toll on a person’s sense of humor, and in fact, major changes or loss of humor can be an early warning sign of cognitive decline. The gains were temporary, or as the authors call it, “transient,” but no doubt felt incredibly meaningful to her family and caregivers. Case study has major limitations, but invites some exciting questions This study was not conducted under laboratory conditions. Rather, it was performed privately and later documented as a case study. It also focuses on just a single participant, which means that others may not experience the same results. And of course, a temporary recovery of cognitive and motor abilities is not the same as a cure. But the findings have some really exciting implications for future research. For starters, it has long been thought that any kind of recovery for Alzheimer’s patients was unlikely: that those parts of their working brain were simply “gone.” Most Alzheimer’s treatments focus on retaining what abilities still remain rather than recovering anything lost. In other words, symptom management. The story of this 80-year-old woman totally alters the picture. It shows that, perhaps, those abilities are not gone at all, but are hidden or suppressed in such a way that they can be reactivated with the right treatment. Psychedelic studies have broken incredible ground in the last few years. MDMA-assisted therapy, for example, is a rapidly growing field of psychology that has shown promising results in the treatment of PTSD. A growing number of U.S. states are also exploring or legalizing psilocybin for therapeutic uses as it has shown to be one of the only effective treatments for major depression in patients that haven’t responded to other medications. And now, “magic mushrooms” might just be the breakthrough we need for Alzheimer’s, notoriously one of the most complex and challenging diseases to treat. It’s fascinating to think where we might already be without 50 years of taboo and tight restrictions around studying these psychedelics. The post A woman with Alzheimer’s hadn’t spoken in 5 years. A dose of psilocybin changed everything. appeared first on Upworthy.

For the past 52 years, St. Benedict’s Preparatory School in Newark, New Jersey, has maintained one mandatory rite of passage for all freshmen: a five-day, 55-mile hike along the Appalachian Trail. This tradition begins in early spring, when students at this private high school start training through exercise and team-building, in addition to learning a specialty. Next, the group is broken down into smaller units with a captain, camp specialist, navigators, cooks and medics. Then, in May, rain or shine, comes the actual hike. While there is “some adult supervision,” according to St. Benedict’s Prep administrator Glenn Cassidy, the kids are meant to rely on what they’ve learned—and each other—to complete the journey. “The only way we can get through this is if we work together and make it there,” Cassidy told CBS News. “We’ll learn how to work together in different ways and finish the task at hand,” said a student preparing to complete the hike last month. At the end of their excursion, the hikers cross a wooden bridge that symbolically welcomes them into their sophomore year, along with high fives from teachers. Some cross that bridge with a few scrapes and bruises, but all cross with wisdom that can’t really be taught in a classroom. Plus, they get some pretty incredible views along the way. A lesson in teamwork before the first step View this post on Instagram This kind of unconventional curriculum seems especially appropriate (and challenging) for these city-dwelling kids, many of whom have never hiked or camped before. Not to mention it gives them a hands-on lesson in resilience. “When life gets difficult, it’s something you can refer back to,” said Cassidy. “You know, there’s a lot of rainy days in life.” A school built on resilience and reinvention Interestingly, the history of St. Benedict’s is, as reporter and New Jersey native Anthony DePalma put it, “a testament to survival.” Racial tension and financial instability overtook the city in the late 1960s, eventually causing the monks who ran the school to consider closing it indefinitely and heading to the suburbs. However, half of the group committed to staying and, over the years, completely adjusted the curriculum to align with their ideals. This includes not only the 55-mile hike, but also an 11-month school year filled with out-of-the-box yet practical elective classes like “Real Men Cook,” “Social Justice and Science,” and “Art, Nature, and Protest,” offered to combat end-of-the-year lethargy. What experiential learning can teach that classrooms can’t A group of hikers. Photo credit: Canva It goes to show what kind of magic can happen when adults who are truly passionate about education are able to experiment with new ways of keeping learning fresh and alive. Sure, a hike of this scale may be a bit of a pipe dream for most public schools, but there are still opportunities to instill hands-on, experiential and communal learning. In other words, while not every school can send students into the mountains for five days, they can take a cue from the idea that some of the most lasting lessons happen when students are asked to do hard things together. The post New Jersey high school has mandatory rite of passage: 55-mile hike on the Appalachian Trail appeared first on Upworthy.