Quick summary of the world's most important good news last week.
In a week that included Friday 13th, OGN hopes you survived unscathed from this supposedly unlucky day - but you may like to discover the probable origins of this ancient superstition - and you may be astonished by this amazing statistic: according to Our World in Data, 2.3 light-years is the distance passengers have traveled on US airlines since the last US airline crashed in 2009. To put that into perspective, one light-year is nearly 6 trillion miles. Perhaps equally astonishing is that cancer-sniffing dogs, with the help of AI, can now detect cancer with 97 percent accuracy. That's good news because early detection is very important. Meanwhile, in other news...
Conservation & Environment
Conservation Success: In Zambia’s Kafue National Park, a conservation organization specializing in wildcats has reported that the number of leopards there has tripled. With an increase of 2.9, there are now 4.4 leopards per 38 square miles of terrain, which is much more than it sounds when you discover how big Kafue is: 22,700 square miles. That's two-and-a-half-times larger than Yellowstone.
Great Green Wall: A greenbelt of about 3,000 km (1,865 miles) was completed last week around the Taklamakan, China’s largest desert. Part of a national effort to end desertification and curb sandstorms, the tree planting effort took 46 years and spans more than 300,000 km2 (11,600 square miles), reports Reuters.
Reintroduction: The rare ʻalalā Hawaiian crow has successfully been reintroduced into the wild in Maui more than 20 years after being declared extinct. "ʻAlalā are found nowhere else on Earth, and their existence is essential in Hawaiʻi. As they fly from tree to tree, these corvids disperse seeds that help grow new trees and restore native forests." The ʻalalā are sacred in Hawaiian culture and regarded as spiritual family guardians.
Longest Journey: A humpback whale has journeyed more than 8,000 miles (13,000km) from South America to Africa, which researchers say is the longest distance ever recorded for an individual whale. Researchers were unsure how the whale may have been received: “When he showed up, was it like, ‘Oooh, sexy foreigner with a cool accent’?”
Sustainability & Climate
Not So Gassy Cows: A new study finds that feeding seaweed pellets to grazing beef cattle reduces their greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent.
UK Renewables Milestone: Renewable electricity production will surpass power generated from fossil fuels for a full year for the first time, according to think tank Ember.
Shoe Footprint: A Dutch recycling company called FastFeetGrinded is doing a great job of stomping out the massive carbon footprint of old shoes.
Divestment: Following years of activism, 77 percent of universities in the UK have now publicly committed to divesting from fossil fuels. The 115 out of 149 universities pledging to exclude fossil fuel companies from their investment portfolios represent £17.7 billion worth of endowments.
Stunning Progress: The speed at which China, the world’s biggest oil importer, is electrifying transport has stunned analysts and is freaking out oil majors. New energy vehicles make up about 10% of all cars on Chinese roads now, and that’s expected to exceed 20% by 2027 and could approach 100% by the 2040s. Chinese demand has made up 41% of annual global oil consumption growth over the past three decades, reports Bloomberg.
Technology
The Original Lord of The Ringtones: Nokia, once the global leader, is to celebrate its pop-culture status by opening a design archive.
Cellphone Connectivity: SpaceX has launched 20 of its Starlink satellites up into Earth's orbit, enabling direct-to-cellphone connectivity for subscribers anywhere on the planet. The big deal with this new venture is that unlike previous attempts at providing satellite-to-phone service, you don't need a special handset or even a specific app to get access anywhere in the world.
End of Charging Cables: A diamond battery that lasts for thousands of years has been invented by British scientists.
Amazon’s Car ‘Dealership’: Amazon Auto is now live. Currently only in America, and only if you buy a Hyundai. But that's more than likely going to change.
And Finally...
Rainy-Day Savings: The value of Norway's sovereign wealth fund, the world's largest, has risen to a record 20 trillion crowns ($1.8 trillion). Built since 1996 as rainy-day savings, the fund owns about 1.5 percent of all listed stocks globally and its current value corresponds to about $321,000 for every man, woman and child living in the country of 5.6 million people.
What Makes Someone Wise? Certain people just seem to embody wisdom: grandparents and teachers, the changemakers we admire from afar, the intellectuals whose ideas have influenced our own. However, given that cultures vary widely throughout the globe, it would make sense that the criteria for being deemed “wise” would vary as well. To test that hypothesis, researchers from the University of Waterloo in Ontario enlisted 2,650 participants across 12 countries on five continents to analyze their perceptions of wisdom. Interestingly, across all locations, people agreed that thinking logically and reflectively and taking others’ thoughts and feelings into consideration are what makes a person wise. The findings have just been published in the journal Nature Communications.
Last week's most popular video? Well, it was 99 year old Dick Van Dyke dancing on Coldplay's video for All My Love, the band's latest single.
Today's Articles
'Christmas Galaxy': JWST has captured an image of what our galaxy likely looked like just as it was forming - it's got scientists feeling very festive.