Ballet dancer with ALS performs again through digital avatar: The Week's Good News
Plus, two lions who spent the beginning of their lives in a small enclosure are now learning what it’s like to roam free, through Zambia’s first rewilding of lions born in captivity
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Ballet dancer with ALS performs again through digital avatar
A ballerina with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) danced again through a digital avatar powered by her brainwaves. At a live performance in Amsterdam, Breanna Olson wore an electroencephalogram headset that captured and “translated” her brain activity and “specific motor signals associated with imagining certain dance movements,” allowing her avatar to dance in real time, said the BBC. The headset’s creator, Dentsu Lab, said it aims to make this “new brainwave interface” accessible to everyone with ALS and other motor neuron diseases.
San Diego has excess water to sell to drier states
San Diego County has built up its water infrastructure to the point it can now sell excess capacity to nearby states. Following a long drought in the 1990s, the San Diego County Water Authority (SDCWA) built the massive Carlsbad Desalination Plant, expanded its reservoir and acquired rights to a Colorado River allocation. Today, with desalinated water to spare, SDCWA is negotiating a swap of its Colorado River rights to Arizona and Nevada, providing the “parched” states with an “unconventional lifeline,” said The Wall Street Journal.
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Zambian reserve rewilds captive lions
Two lions born in captivity are preparing for life in the wild on the vast Lolelunga Private Reserve in Zambia. The reserve partnered with Zambia’s ministries of tourism and parks and wildlife to relocate the 7-year-old lions from a small enclosure at a Tanzanian tourist attraction. The animals, a male and female, will now spend several months in the reserve’s acclimatization habitat, developing scavenging and hunting skills. Once ready, they will have the run of the reserve’s 74,000 acres.
Once-overlooked San Francisco bridge gets beautified
A neglected bridge in San Francisco’s Glen Park neighborhood was turned into a beautiful piece of infrastructure after residents banded together to cover it with tiles. Before its makeover, the crossing at Bosworth Street and Lippard Avenue was dirty and overgrown. About 100 volunteers from Glen Park Beautiful and the Create Peace Project and kids from Glen Park School spent months cleaning and painting the bridge, pulling out weeds and finally designing and installing the colorful mosaics.
