Lofty Matters

Happy weekend to you!  No shortage of good news to share!  The encouraging and heart-warming stories are all over the place.  Enjoy and have a great weekend!

Keep America Beautiful has announced that the Great American Cleanup has resulted in over 48,000 gardens, green spaces and xeriscapes created in 2008.

This is the first year that the number of gardens created was tracked. Previously, participating organizations only tracked the number of trees, flowers, bulbs and shrubs planted.

The movement to create these gardens involved public-private partnerships between businesses and governments at the national, state and local levels.

About Keep America Beautiful

Keep America Beautiful, Inc. was established in 1953 and is the nation’s largest volunteer-based community action and education organization. Keep America Beautiful forms public-private partnerships and programs that encourage individuals to take greater responsibility to improve their community’s environment. The Great American Cleanup is one of its many programs that encourages people to care for communities through volunteer participation. To join the Great American Cleanup visit www.kab.org.

Toddler’s Santa Wish To Bring Daddy Home Comes True

A woman and 2-year-old daughter welcomed home a sergeant Thursday night who had been serving in Afghanistan since March. Kensley Penney said she promises this year she has been a good girl. She said she does just what grandma asks and kisses her special doll with her father’s picture every night.

Kensley is hoping these good deeds will be enough to give her the two special requests she has.

“I want a blue truck and my daddy,” said Kensley.

Her father, Sgt. Scottie Penney, has been serving in Afghanistan since March. Penney’s wife, April, said it’s been especially tough on Kensley. “There are pictures all over the house, and like I said, she has our daddy doll,” Childress said. “When she can, she gets on the Web cam with him and makes funny faces. She knows who daddy is.”

Thursday night, Penney walked into Pine Hills Church in Pilot Mountain to surprise his daughter. The moment was caught on camera.

Kensley waited patiently in her grandmother’s arms to tell Santa Claus her special Christmas wish Thursday night. “I want my daddy,” Kensley told Santa.

“It was pretty nice,” Scottie Penney said. “We have been planning this for some time. I had mixed emotions about how (Kensley) would react.” The rest of the room burst into tears when Kensley and her father were reunited.

“It was very emotional,” he said. “I didn’t see anyone who had a dry eye. It was so great to see the love and support of our community and people who care.”

Two separate research teams in the U.S. have been using materials normally associated with clothing to provide novel, high-tech solutions to age-old health problems.

Scientists are pioneering a method of using spider silk to genetically engineer new bone tissue and thus allow them to re-grow damaged bones and teeth.

Meanwhile, a team of cardiologists are trialing a device made of Gore-Tex (the waterproof fabric used in much outdoor clothing) to help repair holes in the human heart. Gore-Tex is also known as Gore-Helex. This has been fashioned into a small, umbrella-shaped device that can be used to plug a Patent Foramen Ovale (PFO), a common hole found in the upper chambers of the heart of one in five Americans. Although in itself not necessarily dangerous, a PFO can be for stroke victims.

The science is complex but the basic idea is that, working at a molecular level, you combine elements of silk protein with those of some other protein with desirable properties to create the building blocks of an entirely new material. This new material will then be used to fill a hole or a break in a bone or a tooth, acting as a “scaffold” on which stem cells taken from elsewhere in the patient’s body can grow to form replacement tissue. Because silk is also biodegradable, the scaffold would then dissolve away over time like sutures, leaving just the new bone.

Gore-Tex hearts and silk bones — fashion will never seem quite the same again.

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