Round up of good news nuggets to perk up the day.
Good news for those who enjoy a drink and love ice cream too, as an inventor has developed a machine that turns any alcoholic drink into a soft scoop ‘ice cream’ whilst maintaining its potency. The Below Zero machine takes any alcoholic beverage and crystallizes it in under 30 minutes. Suddenly, the summer is looking even more promising!
Cows could be another solution to plastic polution: Scientists at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna found that bacteria living inside a cow’s rumen - one of the four compartments of its stomach - can digest certain plastics, including those used to make single-use packaging. The next step is to identify the microbes responsible, so they can be engineered in labs.
Donald Trump - recently judged to be NOT the worst president ever - has announced that he's suing Facebook, Twitter and Google, in a bid to restore his suspended social media accounts. According to the lawsuit, Mr Trump claims he was banned for “exercising his constitutional right of free speech.” However, the good news (certainly for those who have been enjoying the relative peace and quiet) is that legal experts say the effort is all but guaranteed to fail, as the platforms are private entities, not government institutions that need to guarantee free speech.
3,000 acres of heavily-grazed hills in the Yorkshire Dales are to be transformed into a biodiverse ecosystem, where red squirrels, black grouse and cuckoos can thrive. The UK’s latest rewilding project, called Wild Ingleborough, will see the restoration of depleted peatlands and the expansion of native woodland, both of which act as carbon sinks.
While New Zealand is considered to be one of the greenest countries in the world, it is currently one of the top ten per-capita producers of landfill waste worldwide. That will soon change, however, thanks to new legislation that will ban most single-use plastics by 2025.
The 2021 Global Wind Report provides lots of very good news, and the report's executive summary tells you all you need to know: “Through technology innovations and economies of scale, the global wind power market has nearly quadrupled in size over the past decade and established itself as one of the most cost-competitive and resilient power sources across the world. Today, there is now 743 GW of wind power capacity worldwide, helping to avoid over 1.1 billion tons of CO2 globally - equivalent to the annual carbon emissions of South America.”
As the holders of the largest state-controlled pension fund on Earth, the South Korean monetary authorities have released a statement announcing that the $771 billion National Pension Fund will cease all investments related to coal power both at home and abroad. In further good news, the fund also announced that they would revamp guidelines for investment strategies to ensure a more sustainable pattern emerges in the future.
G7, the world’s seven largest developed economies, have all agreed to stop coal financing by the end of the year.
Thank you (and well done!) to the England football team for raising the nation's spirits by beating Denmark last night to reach the finals of the Euros. The first time the team have reached a final since 1966.
Dive in Deeper
Emperor Penguins
After marching up to 125 miles across the ice, female Emperor penguins must locate their chick among the thousands of others in the colony. Unfortunately, the chicks and their dads all look exactly the same...