Today's Good News

Editor OGN Daily
6 minutes ago
4 min read

Tuesday's smorgasbord of tasty bite-sized chunks of uplifting news.

Sign saying: This area is slightly haunted but manageable — Credit: Cameron Hunt

"Little Bursts of Joy"

Official-looking signs with bizarre declarations are part of an entertaining public art project in New Zealand. One announces that an abandoned building is “slightly haunted,” while another cheekily states a maximum walking speed of 2.83 kmh. Another simply reads “Don’t.” Despite borrowing the font and colour palate of official Christchurch signage, the six installations are meant to “play with the way we take authority and signage so seriously,” Cameron Hunt, who designed and mounted the signs, told the Guardian. “The idea was to make signs that look official, but with completely absurd messages, therefore creating moments of confusion, followed by little bursts of joy.”

Wild Quintuplets

A female Siberian tiger and her five cubs were recently captured on camera in a national park in northeast China, in the country's first documented case of wild tiger quintuplets. Recent conservation measures in the park have involved restoring 2,200 hectares (5,435 acres) of forestland, creating ecological corridors, repairing key wildlife passages, and maintaining continuous anti-poaching patrols. These measures have collectively expanded and improved the habitat for the region's tiger and leopard populations.

image of the largest protoplanetary disk ever observed — Credit: NASA, ESA, STScl, Kristina Monsch (CfA) / Joseph DePasquale

Celestial Hamburger

Scientists are leaving space fans with one more tasty treat before the year comes to a close. Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers captured a stunning image of the largest protoplanetary disk ever observed, which just happens to be shaped like a giant celestial hamburger. The massive formation of dust and gas, which astronomers call Dracula’s Chivito, resides about 1,000 light-years from Earth and spans roughly 400 billion miles. To put that in perspective, NASA estimates this disk is about 40 times the diameter of our own solar system. But aside from making stomachs rumble, astronomers say more research into the vampire disk could provide new insights into the early formation of other planetary systems, possibly even our own.

Credit: Merlin

Identifying Birdsong

Merlin is on a roll. The app, developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in New York, which listens for birdsong and identifies the species singing, has been downloaded 33m times, in 240 countries and territories around the world. Every month, there has been a 30 percent increase in new users of the app, whose sound identification function was launched in 2021. Merlin has been trained to identify the songs of more than 1,300 species around the world, with more birds added twice a year. Different songs make distinct patterns on spectrograms and Merlin is trained to recognise these different shapes and attribute them to a species. Why not give it a go and download the app?

Heading to London

The Bayeux Tapestry will be displayed in the British Museum from next September until July 2027 while its current home, the Bayeux Museum, undergoes renovations. Comprising 58 scenes, 626 characters and 202 horses, the huge masterpiece charts a contested time in Anglo-French relations when William The Conqueror took the English throne from Harold Godwinson, becoming the first Norman king of England. The British Treasury is set to insure the tapestry against damage for an estimated £800m ($1 billion) while it is on loan to the British Museum next year. The 70m-long embroidery depicting the Battle of Hastings in 1066 will travel from France to London as part of a deal between the two nations' governments.

Another Honour

Ice skaters Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean are rumoured to become a dame and knight in the New Year’s Honours of King Charles III. The pair are best known for their performance at the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, where they danced to a special arrangement of Maurice Ravel’s Boléro - the pair won gold and became the highest-scoring figure skaters of all time for a single programme, receiving twelve perfect 6.0s and six 5.9s which included artistic impression scores of 6.0 from every judge. Torvill, 68 and Dean, 67, were both awarded MBEs in 1981 and later OBEs in 2000. However the duo are now set to be appointed damehood and knighthood respectively - more than a quarter of a century after their last honours.

“Gloom and darkness are temporary. Joy comes in the morning.” Sunday Adelaja

On This Day

30 December 1924: Astronomer Edwin Hubble formally announces the existence of other galactic systems at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. This discovery expanded our understanding of the universe's size and structure. Hubble developed a system for classifying galaxies based on their appearance, known as the Hubble sequence. In 1929, he discovered the relationship between a galaxy's distance and its recession velocity, later known as Hubble's Law. This provided evidence for an expanding universe, a concept that would revolutionize cosmology.