Today’s good news comes from the Good News Network

After Mojave Fires, Camels Help Restore Iconic Joshua Tree Groves in the Cherished California Desert

The Mojave National Preserve is having its iconic Joshua trees restored thanks to a crack team of a dozen volunteers, 3 beasts, and 6 humps.

Following wildfires in 2020 and 2023, the National Parks Service undertook a massive project to breed Joshua trees in nurseries and pack them into the high desert country, and a team of volunteers are using camels to do it.

Camels (two humps), not to be confused with dromedaries (1 hump), would have been present on the North American continent during the last Ice Age thanks to the Bearing Land Bridge, so their presence isn’t a total disturbance.

Indeed, the volunteers working with the camels on behalf of the National Park Service argue they cause less disturbance than mules or horses.

Speaking of the Ice Age, the Mojave Desert’s Joshua tree forests are the most expansive in the country, but they were only able to number in the millions because of the Giant Ground Sloth.

These huge furry mammals fed on the Joshua trees and would have been like double-decker buses for their seeds, carting them around to all corners of the desert. Since the extinction of the Giant Ground Sloth, the plant has had to rely on wind and rodents, with decidedly less success.

The germination rate is now extremely low, so the NPS knew the only way to ensure the Joshua tree forests remained as robust as possible was to start a reforestation program for them—setting up a nursery in the Mojave Wilderness Area right on top of the burnt scar from the fires in 2020.

Being that the Mojave is a National Wilderness, there are no roads, no tracks, and no ICE vehicles are permitted inside, so volunteers with the NPS were reduced to hiking hours to the Cima Dome reforestation site with a few seedlings, the cages to protect them, and water to nourish their growth, before having to walk back to the nursery.

Nance Fite, a longtime volunteer at the Mojave National Preserve, realized she had the perfect solution to the arduous task and called up her friend Jennifer Lagusker.

“The job was to pack them and have them carry these things into wherever the park service had us go,” Lagusker told LAist. “When Nance told me about this, I thought, ‘Well, what better way to advocate for the camel than to show the world, hey, they can pack, they really like it, and honestly, they need that kind of a job.’”

Camels are desert specialists, obviously, but their advantages go beyond helping them survive. Their wide and soft feet allow them to pass across the desert wilderness without disturbing the sandy soil and vegetation.

Since 2021, Lagusker and her three camels, Herbie, Sully, and Chico, have been doing most of the restoration work at Cima Dome, a remote area scorched by the wildfires, but after a second round of fires in 2023, the Cima Dome project was considered finished after 3,500 seedlings were successfully planted—carried out into the remote desert on Herbie, Sully, and Chico.

This year,, the caravan is off to another area, where reforestation work on the Joshua trees will continue for a long while.

The good news in this article is that a person thought of a perfect solution to make the project successful. Today’s JohnKu talks about great ideas. I hope you have a wonderful week.

Solution by John W. Howell © 2024

Einstein defined that,

Wanting different results…

From same plan, insane.

Today’s good news story comes from the good news network.

Picture a very unhappy situation: you have leukemia; what are your options? Everyone knows about the side effects of chemo, and most people will have some idea about the Nobel Prize-winning CAR-T cell therapy—but there’s also a third option.

It seems startling to be so overlooked because it’s so straightforward. Blinatumomab cured the young fellow above of his B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia.

The BBC reports that 20 medical centers in the UK are already using off-brand stocks of blinatumomab to treat this cancer, and the country has already approved the drug for adult use.

‘Blina,’ as it’s referred to for short, is also an immunotherapy drug; it seeks out and kills cancer cells that typically disguise themselves from the body’s innate immune system. However, unlike chimeric antigen receptor T cells (CAR-T cell), blina is cheaper.

Blina is a kind of targeted therapy drug called a bispecific T-cell engager (BiTE). It’s administered via a pump and plastic bag through a tube inserted into the patient’s arm.

The bag is carried around in a slim backpack, and the supply lasts a few days. CAR-T cell therapy requires a patient’s cells to be taken out and modified to fight off whichever cancer is present—which takes time.

Like CAR-T, the healthy normal cells are not destroyed as in the case of chemotherapy, allowing the patient to continue leading a mostly normal life.

“Chemotherapies are poisons that kill the leukemic cells but also kill and damage normal cells—and that is what causes their side effects,” said chief investigator and consultant pediatric hematologist Professor Ajay Vora to the BBC. “Blinatumomab is a gentler, kinder treatment.”

Gentler on the body—not on the cancer. Arthur, now 11, was one of the first kids to receive the treatment at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London. His family got the word that his blood cancer was cured on New Year’s Eve.

Having started chemo years before, which both left him very weak and failed to kill the cancer, the family called Blina a “little ray of sunshine” and said that they celebrated the new year twice as hard.

On March 29th, 2018, the US Food and Drug Administration granted accelerated approval to blinatumomab after successful trial results, though serious side effects were not uncommon. It’s available for B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia treatment.

The good news in this article is Cancer is still under attack, and new discoveries are making survival much more frequent. Today’s JohnKu talks about science. I hope you have a great weekend.

Discoveries by John W. Howell © 2024

The disease still kills,

But science still plods along . . .

Miracle life saves.