Snippets of positive, uplifting news to start the week.
Emily Harrington has become the first woman - and the fourth climber overall - to free-climb the Golden Gate route up El Capitan, the 3,000ft granite wall in Yosemite national park in a single day. While most of the US was focused on the results of the presidential election early on Wednesday, the 34-year-old began her climb. She reached the top 21 hours, 13 minutes and 51 seconds later.
Self-watering soil: Texas University researchers have developed a new type of soil that can pull water from the air at night and distribute it to plants during the day - and could potentially expand the map of farmable land around the globe to previously inhospitable places and reduce water use in agriculture at a time of growing droughts.
Due to a highly effective global vaccine programme, the proportion of children under five infected with Hepatitis B has reduced to just under 1%. This is down from around 5%. Eliminating viral hepatitis has been part of a UN Sustainable Development Goal since 2015 and reaching a rate of under 1% in very young children is a huge milestone that brings the world closer to the UN aim of ending hepatitis by 2030.
Tesla battery farm sequel: The first one saved the Australian grid tens of millions of dollars. The next one is bigger in every way.
Despite Trump’s pro-oil and gas agenda, the US renewables sector has employed nearly three times as many people as the fossil fuel industry during his presidency.
Female prehistoric hunters: The stereotypical assumption has been that the prehistoric roles of hunter-gatherer societies were split into women as gatherers and men as hunters. That theory is looking less likely after recent discoveries.
Did you know that socks are the most needed but under-donated item of clothing that homeless shelters receive? That’s why OGN's blowing the trumpet for Jollie Socks. For every pair bought, a pair of Jollie’s is given to a shelter. Maybe pop a pair in a loved one's Christmas stocking or on your own feet?
Sales of electric, plug-in hybrid and hydrogen-powered vehicles in China, the world's biggest auto market, are forecast to rise to 20 percent of overall new car sales by 2025 from just 5 percent now, the State Council announced.
Oregon legalises magic mushrooms: For its therapeutic potential, rather than promoting its consumption for a Saturday night 'trip'. And that's good news as psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) can provide something to people that anti-depressants cannot: an emotional release. This is at the opposite end of the spectrum from antidepressants that simply “blunt” the emotions of patients.
Probably the funniest piece in the UK press about Trump's recent (and, no doubt, on-going) temper tantrums appeared in The Guardian at the weekend, under the title 'What to do when your president has a temper tantrum'. Here's the lead in: "There are several reasons presidents cry. Anyone who has ever had one and been up half the night with it - or all the night with it, night after night - can tell you this. Sometimes presidents cry because they’re tired, sometimes they cry because they need their nappy changed, sometimes they cry because they don’t want you to leave them, sometimes they cry because they have a gnawing pain in their tummy, and sometimes they cry because they’re just being impossible that day and you should probably go to bed and leave them to it but somehow you just can’t. To anyone going through it currently: this phase will pass." If you want to read the rest, click here