Happy News Friday

Editor OGN Daily
12 hours ago
3 min read

Wrapping up the week with an eclectic bundle of positive news stories.

Mākereti Papakura wearing a traditional Maori robe — Credit: Pitt Rivers Museum | University of Oxford

Posthumous Degree

The University of Oxford has awarded a posthumous degree to its first female student from an indigenous community. Born in New Zealand in 1873, Mākereti Papakura is believed to be the first Māori woman to enroll at the university, where she explored the customs of her tribe from a female perspective before she died in 1930, weeks before she was due to present her thesis. The university said her scholarship, combined with her indigenous worldview, "earned her the respect of many Oxford academics at the time". It added that it had gone on "to be celebrated by members of Māori communities and researchers worldwide".

Roman Ingenuity

Under the streets of a Belgian city, an Imperial Roman drainage pipe section made from several hollowed-out tree trunks has been discovered during excavation work. The fact that the settlement had some form of underground plumbing system suggests that modern-day Leuven was an integrated and prosperous part of the empire, despite being located over 700 miles away. The pipe is just another method that Roman plumbers must have used to handle hydro-logistics in their settlements, along with aqueducts (both above and below ground), underfloor piping, and gravity-fed cisterns for water storage.

Child cycling in Paris — Paris tops the rankings

Child-Friendly Cycling

Paris was once notorious for speeding traffic and a parking technique involving gently nudging cars to squeeze into a spot - but now it has topped a European ranking of cycling-friendly cities for children, leaving Amsterdam in second place and Copenhagen in the dust. Analysing 36 European cities in terms of their cycling infrastructure’s suitability for children, the report found that the French capital had raced to the top thanks to investments for the 2024 Olympics and a €250m initiative to build 112 miles (180km) of cycling lanes under mayor Anne Hidalgo. Using data on segregated cycling lanes, low road speeds of 30km/h (18mph) and “school streets” on which traffic is limited, the non-profit Clean Cities Campaign put the Belgium city of Antwerp in third place, before Brussels, Lyon, Helsinki, Barcelona, Bristol, Oslo and Ghent.

The Final Reckoning

The last instalment in Tom Cruise’s popular action series, was met with a 7.5-minute-long standing ovation at its Cannes Film Festival world premiere. The movie, which has already received rave reviews from early critics, was screened at the Grand Théâtre Lumière, where Cruise bid farewell to his beloved character, Ethan Hunt. Audiences cheered for nearly eight minutes at the film’s conclusion, Deadline reported.

TB Vaccine

There are high hopes for world’s first TB vaccine in 100 years after a closely watched clinical trial testing the new vaccine hit enrolment targets earlier than expected because of volunteer enthusiasm in communities located in TB hotspots, says Gavi - The Vaccine Alliance. The vaccine is designed to prevent adults from advancing to the dangerous stage of an infection (the current, century-old vaccine is targeted at babies and children) and could have an efficacy of about 50 percent - huge news given that TB is the world's deadliest infectious disease and kills over a million people a year.

Massive Dataset

The James Webb Space Telescope has completed its most ambitious project yet, capturing 0.54 square degrees (an area roughly equal to three full Moons) in a 255-hour observation revealing extended stellar halos, vast cosmic voids, gravitational lensing effects, and a prominent galaxy cluster 9.9 billion light-years away. The dataset, now publicly available, enables scientists to track cosmic structure development from the earliest galaxies to today's complex universe.

"No matter what happens, if I get pushed down, I’m going to come right back up." Doris Day