Swift Makes Dream Come True for Injured Young Fan

Taylor Swift kicked off her Eras Tour last month in Glendale—and while it was a big night for everyone who managed to snag tickets, it was an unforgettable night for 13-year-old Isabella McCune.

Five years ago, McCune spent nine months in the hospital after an accident left burns on more than 65 percent of her body. Swift was on her Reputations Tour in 2018, the last time she toured until last month, when word reached Swift’s team about McCune’s accident.

McCune was 8 years old when she recorded a message for her favorite singer, telling Swift how her music got her through her worst days and how it helped to keep her calm. Since McCune couldn’t go to Swift’s concert, Swift came to visit her young fan in the hospital!

The pop star snuck into the Arizona Burn Center to sign autographs, pose for pictures, and promise McCune that when she was better, she could come to one of her concerts.

With the help of a local radio station, Swift made good on her promise and recently surprised McCune with tickets to her concert for McCune and her family. The teenager had tried to buy tickets to the concert but wasn’t able to secure them before they sold out within minutes. McCune was beyond excited about her chance to go to the concert, calling it a once-in- a-lifetime opportunity.

“Not only the fact that I was able to go and I got these tickets gifted to me but also that they are from Taylor Swift and her team, and they remembered me and thought of me to give me these tickets,” McCune said.

She is certainly not wrong about it being such a unique opportunity—the pop star’s ticket sales made national news last fall when they sold out in record time. Ticketmaster offered presale tickets and sold more than 2.4 million presale tickets. The high demand, and Ticketmaster’s handling of the presale, led the company to cancel ticket sales for the general public.

Is Mammoth a Thing of the Past or the Future?

What’s for dinner Suppose the answer was a mammoth meatball. ou would have to be pretty hungry. Not to say that it’s ginormous—although it is pretty big—but that it is a meatball actually made from wooly mammoth!

While you might imagine eating with the Croods or the Flintstones to sample such a savory snack, a mammoth meatball was actually cultured, or grown, in a lab at an Australian food company.

Using sequencing that IMITATED wooly mammoth NA—and lling in missing bits with the NA from an African elephant—this massive meatball was unveiled in March. Scientists put the synthesized gene they created into a sheep cell and then cultured it. They ended up growing about 400 grams, or 14

Seaweed Mass Heading to U.S.

A giant blob of seaweed is slowly oating toward Florida’s beaches. The collection of seaweed weighs more than 10 million tons, and stretches more than 5,000 miles—twice the width of the continental United States!

The seaweed at issue is called sargassum, and it’s a leafy BUOYANT algae that collects and oats around the ocean. It’s nothing new for the seaweed to form large blooms in the Atlantic Ocean. What is new is how big these blooms are getting.

Scientists noticed more than 10 years ago that the seaweed masses were becoming large enough to be captured on satellite images. They originally thought it was just a particularly massive bloom, but have come to learn that the seaweed bloom has only gotten bigger and bigger each year.

SEAWEED MASS FACTS: USA

• Width of seaweed mass 5,000 miles

• Ocean it’s

Seaweed Blob ounces, of mammoth meat in the lab.

So, is mammoth going to be on the menu any time soon Probably not. This experiment was mostly intended to start a conversation about the future of meat. “We need to start rethinking how we get our food. My biggest hope for this project is that a lot more people across the world begin to hear about cultured meat,” said James Ryall, the company’s chief scienti c of cer.

There is no plan to have anyone chow down on this particular lab-grown meat. In the U.S., only lab-grown chicken is approved for human consumption. Researchers are not sure that the modern human digestive system could handle mammoth! They note that while our ancestors hunted and ate mammoth, this protein has not been a part of our diet for over 5,000 years. Instead, the meatball was sent to a museum of science and medicine in the Netherlands, the Rijksmuseum Boerhaave.

Once the giant blob approaches land, in this case Florida and other coastlines throughout the Gulf of Mexico, it can really start to cause problems. A large collection of seaweed like this can smother coral reefs and affect shing. Once they reach land, the piles of sargassum can collect in piles several feet high and begin to rot after 48 hours.

The rotting piles of seaweed will smell like manure or rotten eggs—not exactly a pleasant odor! It also releases chemical irritants that can be harmful to people with respiratory issues, such as asthma.

It may sound a little intimidating, and the giant blob currently headed for shorelines in the Gulf of Mexico presents potential problems, but there are several companies trying to nd ways to use the seaweed. It could make things ranging from biofuel to vegan leather. That’s because seaweed is very versatile!

In the ocean, it serves as a source of food and habitat for various wildlife, including sh, mammals, marine birds, crabs and sea turtles. There are a variety of types of seaweed, and it can be used for everything from fertilizer to cosmetics. Seaweed is also used in food, and not just sushi. Certain seaweeds provide extracts used to help thicken things like pudding and chewing gum!