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O'Plerou Grebet is a 22-year-old graphic design student in Ivory Coast. Everywhere he looks, he sees signs of Western influence — from the glass skyscrapers and malls lining the streets in his home city of Abidjan to the way his peers spoke and dressed.

“We are living like we’re Western people,” he says. “It’s like we are not proud of our own culture.”

That even applies to the symbols he texts to friends using the messaging apps on his phone (they especially love to use the “tears of joy” face emoji, he says).

So he used his design skills to create digital stickers that depict what he thinks is missing from global keyboard culture: symbols of history and daily life in Ivory Coast and neighboring countries.

The Emoji Designer Who’s Bringing African Culture To Smartphone Keyboards

As summer approaches and temperatures climb, I thought it would be fun to journey north and visit a creature that builds complex underground homes and doesn’t start shivering until temperatures get cold. Like really, really cold. Read on to discover a few facts about the arctic fox (Vulpes lagopus).

How cold does it have to be for an arctic fox to start shivering? About −70 °C (-94 °F). The Smithsonian notes this small creature is one of “the most superbly cold-adapted mammals.” 

Those adaptations include short ears and a small muzzle, which minimize body surface area (and, by extension, possible points of heat loss). The animal even has fur on its paws to help it walk on ice.

Foxes also stay warm thanks to their amazing multilayered coat. Scientists sometimes refer to this as “pelage” (derived from the Latin word for hair, pilus). This coat changes colors season-to-season – vacillating between grayish-brown in the summer and a striking white in the winter. Other populations have coats that are a beautiful shade of steel-bluish grey.

Arctic foxes feed on other small critters like lemmings, voles, rodents, eggs, fish, and decaying animals.

Their homes are generally situated in frost-free areas, often built into low mounds, or ridges of stratified sand and gravel. Dens can be massive, with dozens of entrances giving way to a complex system of underground tunnels, which can cover up to 1000 square meters. 

According to NOAA, some arctic fox dens have been used for centuries by generations of foxes. 

His name is Eddie Meltzer and he’s 34 years old, but according to NPR’s Ari Shapiro, he looks about 10 years younger. Meltzer’s youthful appearance, however, isn’t what brought him to Shapiro’s attention. Rather, it’s his humanitarian act to assist many families of the victims of the Orlando shooting massacre.

Meltzer tells Shapiro that he’d left Pulse nightclub just five minutes before the shooting began. The next day, as relatives of the victims — many of whom don’t speak English — met with FBI and other law enforcement officials, Meltzer volunteered as a translator and liaison, interpreting dialogue from English to Spanish and back again for all parties.

The Orlando community is slowly shifting from a sense of shock to a deeper understanding of what happened and who the people were that were affected by the tragedy. Shapiro spoke with Meltzer in Orlando about his role in helping to bring some measure of comfort to the grieving families.

Orlando Shooting Survivor Volunteers As Translator For Victims’ Families

Capturing Art in the Dark with Dance Photographer Andrea Mohin

To keep up Andrea’s photography, follow @andrea_mohin on Instagram.

Happy birthday, Carl Sagan.