Global News Podcast - The Happy Pod: The Centenarian Stargazer

Episode Date: April 13, 2024

This week, we meet the 105 year-old man celebrating his thirteenth total solar eclipse. Also: The AI technology giving back a voice to the voiceless. And our intrepid reporter goes in search of the crookie.

Hello, this is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service, with reports and analysis from across the world. The latest news seven days a week. BBC World Service podcasts are supported by advertising. If you're hearing this, you're probably already listening to BBC's award-winning news podcasts. But did you know that you can listen to them without ads? Get current affairs podcasts like Thank you. Amazon Music with a Prime membership. Spend less time on ads and more time with BBC Podcasts. This is The Happy Pod from the BBC World Service. I'm Jackie Leonard and in this edition, uploaded on Saturday, April the 13th.

Every night you look up and see all the stars. And if you keep looking, you see a shooting star. We'll hear from a 105-year-old man who really appreciates the skies in general and a total solar eclipse in particular. Also, the phone app helping people learn to read in the Horn of Africa. Now I can completely read. I'm more ambitious now. I feel I can do anything by myself. South Africa welcomes a cheetah born in captivity in Australia. Their

first walk into the bush is the longest walk they've ever done. They've never seen so much space. They've never seen these beautiful wild animals around them. Also in this podcast. Did you hear that? Would you like me to speak Vlachki now? Yes, yes, we would. All coming up here on The Happy Pod. And we begin with a moment of celestial wonder. You might have heard it mentioned that on Monday,

a total solar eclipse took place, passing over Mexico and a strip of the USA to Canada. Darkness fell, birds, insects and other creatures wondered what was going on, and humans gazed in awe. I don't want it to end! It was really good. I actually cried a little tear or two because it to end. It was really good. I actually cried a little tear or two a little because it was like overwhelming. It was pretty special. We enjoyed it.

Among those watching was Laverne Beiser from Fort Worth in Texas. He is 105 years old and has seen no fewer than 13 solar eclipses. He's been speaking to the youngest member of our team, Nabiha Ahmed. Laverne, you're 105 turning 106 in June. I'm 21. So how would you describe to a 21-year-old why eclipses are so special? What makes them so special? I've never seen one in my life, by the way. Well, it's just something, it's a celestial exhibit that happens not very often and if you don't travel the world you won't see more than one of them in your lifetime but you do like me take tours that travel the world you're gonna see a bunch of them but uh kids if you stay

right here at home you'll never see another one. 300 years from now, there will be one more here in Fort Worth. And how did it make you feel, Laverne, to see this eclipse, your 13th eclipse? It felt good. This is my 13th eclipse. We call it my lucky 13 because the clouds opened up and we saw it. We were lucky to see it because weather predictions showed it was going to be cloudy that day, but it didn't. It opened up, and we saw it. We were lucky to see it because the weather prediction showed it was going to be cloudy that day, but it didn't. It opened up, and we saw it.

So I call it my lucky 13. Tell us a little bit more about how your love for stars began. When you grew up out in the country like that where it's dark, you can look up, you can see the North Star, the Big Dipper, Orion, all constellations. You see the planets, Mercury, Venus, then Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. You keep track of all those stars as they trail around. You can see the Milky Way all the time. I hate to think that modern kids that live in town

have never seen any stars. They ought to go out in the country and look up. I'm really happy that eclipses make you so happy. And this podcast that we're doing this interview for is all about the things that make you happy. And what tips, give us some tips, Laverne. How do we live a long and happy life? I live a clean life. Not a puff of cigarette, not one sip of liquor, no drugs, whatever. Good food, lots of chocolate milk. Wonder at the heavens and chocolate milk.

Excellent advice from Laverne Beiser. And you will find some excellent eclipse pictures on the science pages of our website. And we'll have more eclipse-related news a little later. Now, more from our occasional series celebrating communication and culture and the rare and unusual languages around the world. This week, we're talking about Vlaški, a critically endangered language from the Istrian peninsula of Croatia. It's also known as Istro-Romanian and it has just a few hundred speakers left. That's a taster of Lashki.

I am reliably informed he's talking about learning to play the accordion. Now, we were first made aware of the language when a listener in New York, Roberta Bululovic, emailed in and took our reporter, Harry Bly, on a journey of discovery. What was your reaction when you heard we were looking for rare and endangered languages? I immediately said, I have to send them an email. It was amazing, just amazing. Roberta Belulovic grew up hearing her father speak the language of Istro-Romanian, or Vlachki. Born on Croatia's Istrian peninsula,

he moved to the United States as a child. We used to speak several different languages in the family when the family got together. But whenever they spoke strictly to each other, they always spoke in Vlachki. And I always wanted to learn it. But dad said, well, who are you going to speak it to? And the truth was, there really was nobody but him and my grandmother to speak it to. But Roberta has always maintained a fascination with this language and has been back to Croatia to visit her ancestral home. I did go to his home village of Susnevica several times, and I got to know his cousins. And two of his cousins, especially one named Frane Belulovich, same last name, was a real proponent of the Vlachki language.

There are actually two websites that are devoted to the Istrian language. Both Miro and Frane are on those websites. They were interviewed and Miro is on one and Frane is on the other one. So it's great. I love to hear their voices, even though I don't know what they're saying. This is the voice of Roberta's second cousin, Frane, singing in Vlachki, as provided by the Preservation of Vlachki and Sejanski Language Group. And as Roberta mentions, there's a second project, the Istro-Romanian Language at Oxford University, or Istrox. This group has worked with remaining Vlachki speakers and specialist linguists to explore

the history and help keep the language alive. And of those remaining speakers are some of Roberta's surviving family. We have in the family one current native speaker of Vlachki left in New York. She was very young when she came here, just like my dad, but she was a lot younger than him. And she could actually speak the language if you wanted to hear it. Her name is Celestina Belulovic. And so she, I know, would be really interested in speaking with you. Celestina Belulov still speaks Flashki daily and considers it a crucial part of her identity. She moved to the US in the 1950s after being displaced in the Second World War.

Celestina now lives in the state of New Jersey and spoke to us alongside her daughter, Sonia. He's asking you how important the language is to you. Oh, very important. We love to talk. I have five or six friends that we always talk only Vlachki. Did you hear that? Would you like me to speak Vlachki now? And perhaps one of the best Vlachki phrases we learnt was one that Celestina and her family had to come up with themselves. You know, we don't know how in Vlaski say happy birthday. There's no translation for happy birthday. So tell me what you said for happy birthday.

What do you say when you say happy birthday? Oh, we said... So, and what does that translate into? The day? The day you were born. On the day you were born. Instead of saying happy birthday. All together, we try to figure out there's no happy birthday. I love that. So you just say the day you were born.

It's lovely to have heard some Vlachki from a Vlachki speaker. See that, Nana? You're a celebrity. I can't wait to go back all the time. I love the country. I love all the way around, Opatija, Rijeka, Trieste, not far from home. Celestina Bululovic, our thanks to her and her daughter

and to Roberta Bululovic, who emailed in. If you'd like to tell us about your own language too, we would love to hear from you. You know where we are. Our thanks to her and her daughter and to Roberta Belulovich who emailed in. If you'd like to tell us about your own language too, we would love to hear from you. You know where we are. We are globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk. A cheetah born in an Australian zoo has made a journey back to the wilds of South Africa. The cheetah, known as Edie, is the first of her kind to make the trip, and those who have helped her along the way hope that others will soon follow in her footsteps. Poor Prince. Footsteps, you know what I mean. Our reporter Terry Egan spoke to Derek Milburn and Victoria West

from Wee Wild Africa. Edie is a fairly young cat. She's about just short of two years old now, and she's a beautiful cat, one of the most beautiful cats I've seen in a very long time. Sometimes we get cheaters that just haven't got that personality and the character and the confidence where she's very confident, she wants to go out. I've got a very strong feeling she's going to be a very successful release candidate and today she's really impressed us. So Edie is at Mziki Private Game Reserve located in the northwest province of South Africa. It's got a beautiful savannah habitat with lots of water, rivers. As you implied there, she's never before been in the wild.

So how do you think that she might be able to adapt to that change? It'll be quite different, right, because she's going to be living now in the wild and hunting for herself. But at the end of the day, they have always been wild animals. So I think that they actually will adapt very well, that their natural instinct will kick back in. And we've done this many times. We've rescued and rewilded over a thousand animals in the last few years. And it's a remarkable success of rewilding captive animals.

Tell us more about this process and the journey Edie has been on. So the process starts obviously in Australia where we try and get her to change her diet because many of the captive facilities use like minced horse meat or minced meat to feed the cheetahs. So the big thing is to try and change the diet as much as we can when they're at their source destination. We then have to go through a very lengthy process of doing paperwork to get the animals across to Africa. And we then book commercial flights. So these animals normally fly on commercial flights and they travel really well. And most of the time, we don't even need to give them any sort of tranquilizer. They're quite relaxed in travel.

And what is the long-term aim of all this? The long-term aim of all of this is to really ensure that we have a sustainable cheetah population moving forward. Cheetahs have been persecuted for many, many, many years. And at the end of the day, we want to repopulate the rest of Africa. The cheetah population in South Africa is very healthy. And we want to start moving cheetahs to other countries across Africa now to repopulate those populations. Victoria, how difficult is it to say goodbye to these cheetahs, they having been brought up in Australia?

I think in general, when you're translocating and working with animals, it's always an emotional experience. It's beautiful to see the animals, but at the end of the day, they need to live in the wild. And I think it's even more beautiful to see them going out into the wild and roaming free. Any of the time their first walk into the bush is the longest walk they've ever done. They've never seen so much space. They've never seen these beautiful wild animals around them.

So sometimes it's quite daunting for them. There's new smells, new bird sounds. So it's quite amazing. But within a few weeks, they're completely normal, and they've been there for their whole lives. So they adapt extremely well, and to be very proud of many of the teachers that we've worked with. Derek Milburn and Victoria West, good luck Edie. Now could we be a step closer to helping people with damaged vocal cords speak again? Well researchers in California have built a small adhesive patch that turns muscle movements into electrical signals,

and the signals are then read out using artificial intelligence. It is still at a very early stage, but it looks positive, as Isabella Jewell has been finding out. Here's what it sounds like. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. The adhesive patch generates electricity from movement, so it doesn't need a battery. The work on this new technology is very much in its infancy. But lead researcher Dr Jun Chen from the University of California says the patch could be working in just a few years and at a low cost. Those materials actually are very economically available. So the device itself

just is not very large, just a small tiny patch. It's about 2.5 centimetres by 2.5 centimetres in size. So basically, roughly estimation, the material cost of this type of device is only about two to three US dollars. Once the patch is stuck onto the patient, it registers the movement of the larynx muscles as opposed to the vocal cords, meaning that people with damaged or no vocal cords can use the technology. So far, it has only been used to say pre-recorded phrases and tested on just a handful of people. Martin Birchall, professor of Laryngology at University College

London, wasn't involved in the research but is watching closely. He says it's a significant step forwards. They're addressing a really big unmet need and progress in the field of really valid voice restoration has been relatively slow. It's certainly slow to get through to the people who really need it, which is a very large population, very varied population. So I think it does show that you can actually generate high quality voice using something that's really completely non-invasive and very well tolerated. So I was excited to see it. And it's the use of artificial intelligence that has transformed research in the field. People who know they're going to lose their voices for one reason or another

are now able to bank their voices. The banking of the voice entails storing a large sample of them speaking normally and then this information can then be fed into machine learning systems to allow them to produce artificial reconstructed ways their original voices before they lost it. It's massive. Professor Martin Birchall on the research of Dr. Jun Chen. Still to come. The viral cookie from Paris made its way to Singapore.

It's finally in Geneva. It's just landed in Amsterdam. This bakery in Toronto had them. I had to try them. It's finally in London. Hungry yet? Introducing the cookie. If you're hearing this, you're probably already listening to BBC's award-winning news podcasts. But did you know that you can listen to them without ads? Get current affairs podcasts like Global News, AmeriCast and The Global Story,

plus other great BBC podcasts from history to comedy to true crime, all ad-free. Simply subscribe to BBC Podcast Premium on Apple Podcasts or listen to Amazon Music with a Prime membership. Spend less time on ads and more time with BBC Podcasts. Now, some of the other things that caught our eye this week. That was the sound as Russ Cook crossed his finish line at Africa's most northerly point earlier this week. It marked the end of a gruelling 352-day challenge, which saw him become the first person to run the full length of Africa, a journey of more than 16,000 kilometres. Bravo to him. Also this week, three men have been rescued from a tiny

Micronesian island after they spelt out help using palm leaves along the beach. They were missing for nine days before the US Coast Guard spotted them. And how's this for a winning streak? Italian jockey Frankie Dettori won six consecutive races at the Santa Anita races in California, victories with cumulative odds of 77,000 to 1. And credit where it's due, the horses were called Ball Don't Lie, Recinto Romperre, Roberta's Love, Kath and Marisa, Nothing Like You and Royal Charter. Well, they were the ones doing the running. Now, a brilliant solution to an intractable problem,

a phone app called Diaries that's helping people in the Horn of Africa learn to read and write. It's enabled half a million learners in Somaliland so far, almost half of them women and girls. The founder of the app is British Somali businessman Ismail Ahmed and he spoke to Claire Bates. The first stage is about the alphabet, the basics. And the second stage takes users to read, you know, the basic stories. And the third stage is a digital library to read longer stories. We've also added a reading meter which forces users to speed up their reading and that is the one which really helps them to achieve 60 words per minute. The challenge we face in the Horn of Africa is that literacy levels are one of the lowest in the world. We have a highly mobile population and absence of schools in rural areas.

So the foundation put me in touch with some female market traders in Hargeisa, the capital of Somaliland. And they had been given phones preloaded with the app to see how easy or hard they found using it. One of the women, Samir, told me about her experience. I didn't get the chance to study. I'm from a generation where it was believed that young girls should stay at home and do house chores. I heard about the app a few months ago. I heard that it helps women, especially mothers, learn how to read and write. I have just finished learning how to construct sentences and now I can completely read. I'm more ambitious now.

I feel I can do anything by myself. Wherever I go, I can read and understand the billboards and signs around me by myself. I also spoke to Keen, a mother and grandmother who runs a fruit and vegetable. She told me she missed out on schooling due to the civil war. I've been using the app for six months. Now I'm on level two, which means I can read and write messages on my phone. Keane says she now enjoys reading lots of stories on the app.

The last one was about a woman called Doug Deer, a woman with long ears who eats other people. It's a Somali folk story, often told by parents to warn their children. Since learning with Dariz, I feel I'm out of the darkness and into the light. Education is light, so I feel very happy. The words of keen, satisfied Dariz user, ending that report by Claire Bates. Now, it might not entirely surprise you that the HappyPod team is very keen indeed on baked goods. So when we heard about a new pastry taking Paris by storm, we knew we wanted in. Now, you might already have heard of the cronut or the cruffin by now. That's a mix of croissant with a donut or a muffin, obviously.

But now a new hybrid is overshadowing them both with queues around the block at Boulangerie Louvard in Paris when they launched Le Croquis, a crispy croissant filled with American-style cookie dough. The novelty item soon spread around Europe, and in London, Philippe Conticini, made famous for their extra, extra large croissant, crafted their own version.

Stephanie Prentice took on the gruelling task of investigating. It's a question that's kept many a master baker up at night. What would happen if a cookie and a croissant became one? In France, a boulangerie nation, pastry innovators got to work and TikTok responded to their creation, Le Croquis, as the idea went global. Everyone is going crazy over the croissant cookie dough hybrid. The viral cookie from Paris made its way to Singapore. It's finally in Geneva. It's just landed in Amsterdam. This bakery in Toronto had them. I had to try them. The viral cookie croissant is finally in London.

Philippe Contaccini in North London is one place that joined in the trend. We got a lot of people asking, what is a TikTok croissant? Pastry chef Shiro let us behind the scenes. The first thing we make the croissant dough one day before and then you cook croissant and then you take out. Then you cut your croissant, put your cookies dough inside and on the top and then you bake. So did you have a few that went wrong when you first started?

Yeah, yeah. We tried so many times, so many mistakes, so many things. We know TikTok loves them, but here at The Happy Podcast, we are true investigative journalists, so testing was required. Across the city to the west is South Kensington, known as the France of London and home to a high concentration of boulangeries. It is a cookie squashed onto a croissant, but the croissant is still risen,

so it looks like a standard croissant. It looks lovely, actually. Michael from Cape Town lives there, eats in the bakeries every day and identifies as a sweet treat expert. So I have gone for the large croissant because that's what the place is known for. Added to that, I've added just a baseline cookie,

so I can do a little cookie test. And then I've got the crookie on the left here. So after doing the large croissant, a taste of the cookie, and then the crookie, I will have the right ingredients to give you the correct answer, if it's good or not. All right, let's get this guy. Mmm. It's so dry not. All right, let's get this guy. Mmm. It's so dry.

I need coffee. No, I'm kidding. Okay, initial reports seem to indicate that even with the cookie on top, the croissant is dry. It's going to be some people's thing. It's not mine. I'm probably a traditionalist. I like a cookie and and croissant slightly separately. Some people might like the innovation, but I think it's a little bit too much for myself. The cookie is priced at almost £6 or $7.50, something TikTok and Michael questioned.

It's quite on the top end, if I must be honest, on the cookies that I would have around this area. Would I come back for the cookie alone? No, is the crookie a pricey novelty item or an innovation that's here to stay? For chef Shiro, at least, it's something that just makes people happy. It's good. You feel very, very nice inside. It's a very nice feeling, yeah. Because the people, they love it. You know, you work very hard for this one, for the people. When you see the people, they are happy.

You are happy as well. Chef Shiro ending that report from Stephanie Prentice. And was there any left for me? No, no, there wasn't. Back to our top story again now. With so many millions of people excited by the total eclipse this week, it's no surprise that one song in particular made it back into the charts. One time I was falling in love

Now I'm only falling apart There's nothing I can do A total eclipse of the heart Here's the Grammy award-winning singer Bonnie Tyler. Well, it's number one in the iTunes chart again. That doesn't mean mega bucks, but it's still great to be number one in America again. Jim Steinman wrote the most iconic songs for Meatloaf, myself, Barbra Streisand, Celine Dion. You know, he was just a mega superstar writer, you know.

And I always wanted to work with him, and my dream came true in the 80s. I couldn't believe it the first time I heard this song, how wonderful it was, and that he was giving it to me. It's like a theme song for the eclipse every time it comes around, you know. I don't think it's coming around again for how many years. It is an incredible sort of how many people have told me that they had their first dance to this song, they fell in love to this song. And, you know, it's just amazing, you know.

And I sang it again last night and never get tired of singing it and they go crazy. And that was Bonnie Tyler. I don't know what to do when I'm always in the dark We're living in a powder keg and giving up And that's it from us for now. Do email us if you have a story that you think belongs in the Happy Pod or if you just want to say hello.

The address is globalpodcast at bbc.co.uk. This edition was mixed by Gareth Jones. The producers were Anna Murphy and Jacob Evans. Our editor is Karen Martin. I'm Jackie Leonard. Thank you for listening. Goodbye. I love you.