The media's choices about what to cover seem increasingly driven by the market's lowest common denominator. In 2007, however, serious issues, like the war in Iraq and the U.S. attorney scandal, still rose to the top.View Transparency: On News
Doing the right thing isn't always easy. It requires strength, integrity, and sometimes, a lot of effort. An anonymous landlord demonstrated all these qualities with a kind-hearted gesture toward his former tenant, Chris Robarge. Chris was so moved by the surprise that he shared the full story on social media. The uplifting tale left people in tears, with many praising the landlord as someone who truly lives by his values.
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In an age where thank you letters and kind notes are becoming rare, this landlord sent Chris a heartwarming letter that left him speechless. Chris, originally from Worcester, Massachusetts, had rented from this landlord for quite some time. In August 2021, he shared a Facebook post expressing his astonishment and gratitude for the unexpected gesture.
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“I have been sitting with this for more than a day and I am still completely beyond an actual way to describe what this act means to me," he wrote in the post. "All that I can say is that there are people who talk about their values and there are people who actually live them, and the reason I wanted to share this is that I want to encourage us all to actually live our values." Chris added, "Do it off the clock, do it when no one is watching, do it always."
A few days ago, the landlord contacted Chris to ask for his current address. Chris wondered why, but when he received an envelope in the mail, he was astonished. Inside was an honest letter and a cheque for $2,500. Chris shared pictures of both items in his post. While he had enjoyed his time renting from the landlord, this generous gesture was completely unexpected. The heartfelt letter explained that the landlord had sold his house and was giving Chris and every former tenant a share of the profit.
The landlord stated in the letter that keeping this money after the sale of the property was “exploitative and antithetical to a just society.” He even explained the math behind the amount on the cheque he had enclosed with the letter. “I tried to keep the rent equivalent to the monthly expenses of keeping the house (mortgage principal, mortgage interest, taxes, insurance, utilities, improvements). While the mortgage principal, especially in the first years of a mortgage, is a small fraction of those overall expenses, I wanted to return to you that portion of the rent you paid,” the owner described.
He also mentioned that he calculated the principal amount paid each month in the rent, split it by the tenants who were living in the house at that time, and added 40% as the increase in the house cost. “While it’s not much, it’s yours! It was a great house and I’m glad that I was able to share it with you,” he said.
After the post caught people’s attention, Chris posted an update revealing that he was keeping $500 for a car repair service, and donating the rest of the money to those who needed it the most. “I want this good deed to reach as far as possible,” he said. He offered $500 to Black and Pink Massachusetts, a prison abolition organization. Apart from this, he said he was going to fill every Worcester Free Fridge.
The post melted the hearts of people online and gave some of them "a reason to believe once again in humanity.” @g.w.smith.5 commented, “I needed to see this kind of humanity today. Thank you for that.” @virginia.bechtold too was inspired by the landlord’s generous act. She said, “This is what I’ll do if I ever own a rental property. Thanks for the inspiration.” @lisa.mullen.18 also noted, “This is wonderful...goes to show that there are good people out there.”
Chris concluded his post with a shout-out to his landlord and an inspiring message for others, “If you can't do what my former landlord did, let this inspire you to give whatever you can spare to someone or someplace that needs it."
Many lauded Chris' landlord. "What an amazing example of good karma. I’m sure you were careful to choose a landlord with similar values to you. This is wonderful," wrote Kali. Virginia added, "'Not all landlords' - this is what I’ll do if I ever own a rental property. Thanks for the inspiration." Casey added, "If this is who I think it is they are a gem of our community and one of my personal heroes (if Im wrong...well they are obviously all of those things anyways)."
Researchers in Brazil have uncovered a remarkable discovery that spans across millennia—dinosaur footprints found alongside ancient rock art dating back over 9,000 years. This significant find took place in Serrote do Letreiro, located in the Sousa Basin, and the research has been published in the journal Scientific Reports.
The study, led by Leonardo P. Troiano, Heloísa B. dos Santos, Tito Aureliano, and Aline M. Ghilardi, suggests that prehistoric hunter-gatherers in Brazil created mysterious rock art designs—known as petroglyphs—next to dinosaur footprints. These findings offer valuable insights into the intersection of paleontology and archaeology, particularly at the Serrote site.
The paper notes that while researchers first identified the petroglyphs in 1975, they only recently discovered these carvings close to massive dinosaur footprints. This discovery was facilitated by the innovative use of drones. The tracks, they said, belong to dinosaurs from the Cretaceous Period, which ended around 66 million years ago.
Researchers believe ancient humans deliberately placed these carvings next to the dinosaur prints, noting that some petroglyphs are only 2 to 4 inches away and may depict the footprints themselves.
This suggests that people of that era were deeply curious about the footprints and interacted with them. "The individuals who crafted the petroglyphs were acutely aware of the footprints, likely selecting the location precisely because of them," Leonardo Troiano, the study’s lead author and an archaeologist from Brazil's National Institute of Historic and Artistic Heritage, told Live Science "It would have been impossible to overlook their presence."
Troiano said these ancient humans were highly interested in the footprints and considered them meaningful in some way. This also goes parallel to the location of Serrote. Serrote do Letreiro, which translates to "Signpost Hill" in Portuguese, is close to the Valley of the Dinosaurs, a conservation area renowned for its hundreds of fossilized dinosaur footprints.
Troiano and his fellow researchers carried out the research with a group of middle-school students who surveyed the site in 2023. In addition to learning about the convergence of paleontology and archaeology, the students helped photograph the specimens. The team noted that the tracks belong to various types of dinosaurs, such as meat-eating theropods, long-necked sauropods, and two-legged ornithopods, including iguanodontian dinosaurs.
The petroglyphs uncovered were mainly carvings of circles filled with lines and other geometric strokes. These artworks are attributed to humans who lived in the region anywhere between 9,400 and 2,620 years ago. "They were small seminomadic groups of hunters and gatherers who lived in society and used objects made from stones," Troiano said. These ancient humans made these rock carvings with two techniques; perforation and scraping, the team said.
"Perforation involves using a kind of stone hammer to create depressions on the surface, resembling stippling, while scraping entails rubbing a stone against the surface until it forms the desired engraving," Troiano explained. The petroglyphs offer crucial evidence about the historical population and shed light on the rituals and practices of that time. “I think rock art creation was embedded in some sort of ritual context: people gathering and creating something, perhaps utilizing some psychotropics,” said Troiano, adding that these people were interested in “what the footprints represent.”
Affirming Troiano’s hypothesis, Jan Simek, a distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of Tennessee, told CNN, “The paper provides an interesting new example of how ancient people observed and incorporated fossils on the landscape into their religious experiences and interpretations.”
He said this case is another archaeological example of the “human tendency to tie the spiritual world created in the imagination to unexplained things in the world around us.”
This article originally appeared four months ago. An earlier version of the story wrongly claimed that the 9000-year-old rock art suggested ancient humans knew about dinosaurs. The error is regretted. The story has since been updated.
Mystery lurks everywhere. Like an undersea treasure box, it lurches in every object, whispering sweet nothings in spaces long abandoned. From closed attics to vintage journals, mystery hangs in everything. At least, this is what Mr. Jimmie Smith would think, from now on, each time he looks at anything. He found this mystery and hit the jackpot, literally, in one of the shirts hanging in his closet. And this mystery turned out to be a 24-million-dollar winning lottery ticket, according to NJ.com
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A retired security guard by profession, and a father of two, the 68-year-old Jimmie went through his closet after he heard an announcement on television that this particular lottery ticket hadn’t found its prize winner yet. Jimmie, who had been an avid buyer and collector of lottery tickets, gave it a thought to do a quick check inside his closet. And there he found it, the ticket to his jackpot, lying among stacks of booklets and piles of crisp tickets.
Jimmie couldn't believe his luck, especially considering it was tucked away in his closet. “I ended up with a stack - a pile of tickets, including the one they were talking about on the news," he told lottery officials. He also said that he's been buying tickets in New Jersey and New York since the 1960s, but has never been in a rush to see if he’s the winner of some prize. This time, he checked the numbers and stood stunned. He wasn't sure he could believe it as he sat there gazing at the piece that had brought golden fortune to him, “I stood there for a minute thinking, ‘Do I see what I think I see?'” he told NJ.com. “I had to stick my head out the window and breathe some fresh air. I was in serious doubt. I really had to convince myself this was real.” But it was real indeed.
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On the other side of it, Gweneth Dean, director of the New York Gaming Commission’s Division of the Lottery, said, “A lucky New Yorker has a $24 million Lotto payday just waiting — but the winner has to act fast as time is running out. We urge New York Lottery players: Check your pockets. Check your glove box. Look under the couch cushions. If you have this winning ticket, we look forward to meeting you,” according to The Washington Post.
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On May 25, 2016, Jimmie, a resident of East Orange, New Jersey, won $24.1 million from the New York Lottery. The winning numbers were 5, 12, 13, 22, 25 and 35. Jimmie had earlier bought the ticket at a grocery and tobacco shop at 158 Church Street in the Tribecca neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, according to NJ.com. “I always told myself, ‘I’ll check them when I have the time,'” he said. However, post this prize-winning and claiming himself as the owner of the winning ticket, Jimmie suddenly disappeared. He reappeared five months later only to complete the required paperwork and disappear again, as reported by The Washington Post. He chose to receive his $24 million in installments over 26 years, according to the commission.
Earth's abundance of water is what makes it a "blue planet." Scientists have long speculated about how all this water ended up here. Some studies suggested that water arrived on Earth through collisions with icy comets or asteroids. However, the question persisted: Did Earth's water come from outer space or from within? A 2014 study provided insight into this mystery when scientists discovered a massive reservoir of water trapped within hot mantle rocks. The findings were published in the journal Science.
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The discovered reservoir contains three times the volume of all Earth's oceans combined. It was surprising, because usually, the Earth’s mantle, 254 to 410 miles deep, is an efflux of scorching hot rocks covered with magma. According to New Scientist, scientists have long believed that the mantle’s “transition zone,” the boundary between the upper and the lower mantle, could contain water trapped in rare minerals.
During this study, they finally discovered a colossal body of water trapped inside a blue rock called ringwoodite. Ringwoodite is a deep blue mineral, chemically similar to peridot, a green mineral often used in jewelry. “The ringwoodite is like a sponge, soaking up water,” Steven Jacobsen of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, said, per a university press release. “There is something very special about the crystal structure of ringwoodite that allows it to attract hydrogen and trap water. This mineral can contain a lot of water under conditions of the deep mantle.”
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The team discovered this ringwoodite around 430 miles underground in the mantle. This gave a clue that the water on Earth could have simply seeped from within its core, rather than coming from a comet or asteroid collision. “It’s good evidence the Earth’s water came from within,” Jacobsen told New Scientist.
To conduct the research, scientists employed 2,000 seismometers that helped them study the seismic waves generated by more than 500 earthquakes. As these waves quiver through the Earth’s core, scientists can examine them from the surface. “They make the Earth ring like a bell for days afterward,” said Jacobsen. Since the waves take longer to travel through wet rocks than dry rocks, the speed of the waves told scientists which rocks could contain water. 434 miles deep, the temperatures and other conditions were just perfect to squeeze the water out of the ringwoodite. “It’s a rock with water along the boundaries between the grains, almost as if they’re sweating,” explained Jacobsen.
The discovery of this huge ocean could provide some fascinating insights about Earth’s water cycle, and how seas and oceans were initially formed on the planet. “We should be grateful for this deep reservoir,” said Jacobsen. “If it wasn’t there, it would be on the surface of the Earth, and mountaintops would be the only land poking out.”
“Geological processes on the Earth’s surface, such as earthquakes or erupting volcanoes, are an expression of what is going on inside the Earth, out of our sight,” added Jacobsen. “I think we are finally seeing evidence for a whole-Earth water cycle, which may help explain the vast amount of liquid water on the surface of our habitable planet. Scientists have been looking for this missing deep water for decades.”
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