OGN Wednesday

Feb 18
4 min read

Today's smorgasbord of tasty news nuggets to help put a spring in your step.

Barak Obama wearing a dark blue suit in the Oval Office — Barack Obama in the Oval Office

Obama's Aliens

"They're real but I haven't seen them," former US President Barack Obama told American podcast host Brian Tyler Cohen during an interview published at the weekend. "They're not being kept in Area 51. There's no underground facility unless there's this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States," he added. After his comment that "they're real" caused a bit of an online sensation, Obama has since clarified that the chances Earth has been visited by aliens is "low". Adding: "Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there's life out there. But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we've been visited by aliens is low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!" But that's not the first time Obama talked about aliens.

Mars Meteorite: 25 years ago, the President thought they had found alien life.

The Yangtze River in China running through a wide gorge — Yangtze River

Yangtze Recovery

The Yangtze River in China, which has been in ecological decline for 70 years, is showing signs of recovery thanks to a sweeping fishing ban. The ban was made more effective by the implementation of “evolutionary game theory”, which included finding alternative employment for fishers. One veteran biologist said it was the most positive freshwater conservation story he had seen anywhere in the world in 20 years. “It is really fantastic news. It is one of the first times that we can say that government measures have not just worked, but have really improved things,” said Sébastien Brosse, of the University of Toulouse in France.

Snow capped mountains in Torres Del Paine National Park — Torres del Paine National Park

Better be Quick!

For the third year running, tourism company Las Torres Patagonia is running a scheme dubbed ‘10 Volunteers for 10 Days’. It invites travellers to enter a competition and win one of - you guessed it - 10 coveted places to stay in Patagonia with all expenses paid. In partnership with SKY Airlines, Las Torres Patagonia is inviting anyone over 21 years old from Chile, Brazil, Canada, the UK and the US to partake in rebuilding and restoring trails that lead to the Base Torres viewpoint. But hurry, applications close on 20 February. There’s more information on the official Las Torres Patagonia website.

Entrance to the Intihuasi Seed Bank — Credit: Moving Ecologies

Chile's Seed Vault

You’ve heard of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway, but did you know that Chile has one too? In the Atacama Desert, one of the world’s driest regions, the Intihuasi Seed Bank is freezing thousands of native plant species to safeguard them against climate change, extinction and disaster. Stored at -20C in earthquake-proof vaults, the collection now underpins species recovery, supports rewilding pilots, and acts as a genetic backstop for a country where 46 percent of plant species exist nowhere else on Earth.

Free Meals for Kids

We’re seeing a growing global focus on nourishing young minds and bodies with national school meal programmes now serving 466 million children worldwide, up by 80 million since 2020. Most impressive? Indonesia’s plan to feed all 80 million of its school kids, which kicked off last year.

Disease Elimination

It takes years of dedication and multi-agency coordination to eliminate a disease, and yet 17 countries hit that milestone in 2025 - the most in one year ever. The particular highlights are that trachoma bit the dust in Egypt, Mauritania, Senegal, Burundi, Fiji; the Maldives achieved the first-ever ‘triple elimination’ of mother-to-child transmission of HIV, syphilis, and hepatitis B; and Brazil became the first country of over 100 million to stop mother-to-child transmission of HIV.

'Cartel' Lawsuit

Michigan has filed a “groundbreaking” lawsuit against four major fossil fuel companies and the top U.S. oil lobbying group for its role in fueling both the climate crisis and rising energy costs. The state says they’ve acted as a “cartel” to both stifle the growth of renewable energy sources and electric vehicles and suppress information about the dangers of the climate crisis, which it alleges violates state and federal antitrust laws. This “collusion” has both driven up utility costs and slowed the transition to EVs in the state, it says in the lawsuit. This is good news as it’s important that any entities who knowingly got us where we are today are held accountable.

“For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.” Steve Jobs

On This Day

18 February 1879: French Sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi is awarded a US patent for his design for the Statue of Liberty, titled "Liberty Enlightening the World". This patent legally protected his unique artistic design.