Good News Nuggets

Cosmic round up of the best good news snippets.

• A "jokester" horse stole the show during a maternity shoot for an expecting couple in Indiana. Amanda Eckstein and Phillip Werner were posing with their horses when Buckshot, a 12-year-old Tennessee Walker, made sure to "smile" for the camera, too.

• The oldest underground network in the world is finally joining the digital revolution. Transport for London has tasked BAI Communications with bringing 4G and 5G to the Tube, parts of which are over 150 years old. BAI has secured a 20-year concession to bring all of the Tube, including its tunnels, online by 2024.

• Mars might be wetter than we thought. A NASA research team studying the layered deposits of the Red Planet's south pole discovered what seem to be dozens of subsurface lakes. This doesn't mean humans can survive easily on Mars, not least of which because many of the subsurface lakes are probably frozen. But it opens a door for future scientific missions to the Red Planet.

• The LEGO Group has unveiled a prototype brick made entirely of recycled plastic, the latest step in its journey to make LEGO products from sustainable materials.

• Pistachios aren’t just a good source of protein, they are a complete protein - meaning they contain all nine essential amino acids, which are the ones human bodies don’t generate on their own and therefore need to be acquired through diet. Most complete proteins are animal-based, which means that for vegans and those who want to cut out their meat and animal byproduct intake, pistachios are the perfect replacement.

• Following New York state’s recent move to divest from fossil fuels in their pension fund, the state of Maine is now adopting legislation to match that commitment. This will only become really good news when every other state follows suit too.

• Riding a bicycle, you will have noticed how punishing the air gets as you start going faster. After a point, you just accept defeat and give up. But if you are a big fan of high speeds and want to design the fastest electric motorbike on the planet, you have to find a way against this adversary. This is what motorcycle designer Robert White has done by putting a hole in the centre of his bike, reducing drag by 69 percent. This enables his bike to reach 250mph and become the fastest electric bike in the world.

Dive in Deeper

• Manchester to get a bit of Manhattan: Abandoned railway viaduct to be turned into an urban oasis like New York’s High Line. It’s an area steeped in rich history - the site of the city's Roman origins, the world’s first passenger railway, and was the terminus for the world’s first industrial canal. [2 mins] Transformation...

• Homo Longi: Vast skull discovered in China may belong to another new human species. [2 mins] Dragon man...

• Cosmic dawn: Astronomers have worked out when the first stars began shining. [2 mins] Twinkle Twinkle...

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Spycam

Who would you rather face - a gang of meerkats or a robot cobra? Spy in the Wild from BBC Earth.