Upbeat News Monday
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What better way to start the week than with a global collection of upbeat news nuggets?
Perfect Timing
You will no doubt recall that earlier this month, a solar eclipse plunged parts of Europe into darkness, from Iceland to Spain. In Spain, the astronomical event resulted in breathtaking images of the moon covering the sun over various locations, but no shot has sparked as much awe as this one starring Olympic skateboarder Danny León, who perfectly timed a jump trick with the solar eclipse. León, who competed in the men’s park event at the Tokyo 2020 and Paris 2024 Games, planned this shot for a long time. With the eclipse lasting only around a minute shortly before sunset in Spain, there was no room for error. And he absolutely nailed it.
Good Quick Hits
An mRNA vaccine customized to a patient’s tumors has cleared a late-stage trial for the first time. If the data holds up, this vaccine - which prevents melanoma recurrence - could be the first mRNA-based cancer treatment to be approved.
0.04%: Malaria prevalence in Zanzibar, down from 40% two decades ago.
The Gulf oil shock has electric car sales booming in some unexpected places. They’ve quintupled in South Africa, for instance, and doubled in Colombia. Globally, battery-powered and hybrid vehicles will account for 29 percent of new cars sold this year, up from 4 percent in 2020, says the New York Times.
500K: Number of residential solar batteries now installed in Australia.
Forest regrowth and falling levels of deforestation are behind a “steep drop” in land-use emissions since 2015. Land-use emissions, which have been falling since the 1990s, refers to the carbon released when forests or peatlands are degraded.
Renewables will overtake coal in electricity generation this year. The International Energy Agency says that after reaching near parity with coal in 2025, global electricity generation from renewables will grow by more than 8 percent this year.
The lungs of children living in London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone showed remarkable recovery in a large study, the first major evidence that local clean-air zones could mitigate pollution’s harmful effects on children.
Hilarious
Voters in Alaska’s US Senate primary face a confusing choice at the ballot box in November, with two Republican candidates sharing the same name. Incumbent Dan S. Sullivan has accused the state’s Democrats of scheming to get rival Dan J. Sullivan “placed on the ballot to confuse voters” - a charge he denies, said NBC News. To add to the confusion, the former mayor of the Alaskan city of Anchorage - Dan A. Sullivan - has weighed in to endorse Dan S. Sullivan.
Each to Their Own
The Simpsons has featured an array of adventures for over 30 years, and now - honoring its quirky charm - artist and The Simpsons super fan Marc Hagan-Guirey aka Paper Dandy has built a massive model of Springfield, “America’s Worst City.” Comprising 76 handmade individual buildings, the entire project took the artist three years to complete. “One evening, I was browsing through Pinterest and went down the rabbit hole of ’Springfield at night’ images,” the artist tells My Modern Met. “I had quite a visceral reaction to those - comforting, nostalgic, reflective, maybe even a little sadness. That was the lightbulb moment and I decided it was exactly where I wanted to immerse myself for what became three years worth of spare time.”
"Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man's desire to understand." Neil Armstrong
On This Day
31 August 1897: Thomas Edison patents the Kinetoscope (Kinetographic camera), a device that produces moving pictures (US patent 589168). It used a continuous strip of 35-millimeter celluloid film with perforated edges to record motion and photographed objects at roughly 30 pictures per second to trick the brain into seeing smooth movement via persistence of vision.
Today's Articles
Unusual Discovery: Mysterious 2,700-year-old bronze sword found standing upright in a forest in Poland.
Mood Boosting Video
A new timelapse video compresses over four centuries of its transformation into a single, mesmerizing watch, tracing New York’s evolution from a 17th-century outpost to the dense, soaring metropolis it is today.
