There are a lot of great and good things happening in the world today! Stories to brighten your day.
Here’s some of the good news you might have missed lately.
The Giant Panda and the Manatee (family: Trichechidae, genus: Trichechus) commonly known as sea cows are no longer on the world’s endangered animals list.
In an update to their Red List of Threatened Species, which assesses a species’ conservation status, the IUCN reported the giant panda and Manatee population has improved enough for the endangered species label to be downgraded to “vulnerable.”
The Ocean Cleanup Project plans to cleanup 40% of the human waste plastics starting this year.
The organization issued a press release announcing it had completed a reconnaissance expedition that would pave the way for a June 2016 test of its prototype.
With the help of $2.2m in crowdfunding, 21-year-old founder Boyan Slat announced his plans to deploy 100 kilometers of passive floating barriers in an effort to clean up 42% of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch’s plastic pollution in 10 years.
In China, the government announced plans to end the ivory trade in the country.
China also put a ban on new coal mines and aims to target 15% of their economy in using renewable energy by 2020.
24 Countries has agreed to create a world’s largest marine park in the Southern Ocean, brokered in Australia which in estimation, covering an area the size of United States of America.
In Israel, the country produced 55% of its freshwater from the sea (desalination process), turning the desert into farmlands.
An Ebola vaccine was developed by Canadians with a 100% success rate.
In India, people had planted 50 million trees within 24 hours with around 800 thousand volunteers.
The World hunger has reached its lowest point in more than two decades.
The tiger population is on the rise for the first time in a century. After a century of decline, the most recent tiger data revealed there are about 3,890 tigers in the wild, which is up from 3,200 in 2010, according to the World Wildlife Fund.
After more than a century, Albert Einstein’s theory of gravitational waves has proven correct.
A team of scientists announced that they had heard and recorded the sound of two black holes colliding a billion light-years away, a fleeting chirp that fulfilled the last prediction of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
In Costa Rica, about 90% of the country’s electric grid now runs on renewable energy. Costa Ricans are the first in the world to power their country for so long without the use of fossil fuels, and the record-breaking achievement was quickly picked up by news agencies all over the world.
The United States veteran homelessness has declined by 50% in the last decade.
The ice bucket challenge has provided ALS research enough funds to identify a gene associated with the disease.
The charity campaign that went viral in the summer of 2014 and left scores of notable persons from Gates and Mark Zuckerberg to George W. Bush and Anna Wintour shivering and drenched, has paid off in the most spectacular way.
The Colombian government and Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) rebels signed a peace agreement, ending a war that left of approximately 7 million people dead or homeless.
The revised document will be signed in Bogota between FARC leader Rodrigo Londono and Santos, who won the Nobel Peace Prize last month for his efforts to end the conflict with the insurgent group.
A drone called “Juno” flew over 445 million miles to orbit Jupiter in order to learn more about the origin of our solar system and the universe.
Canada protected 85% of the Great Bear Rainforest, part of the world’s largest temperate rainforest.
Measles has been eradicated from North, Central, and South America.
The Pan American Health Organization (which is part of the United Nations) declared measles, a very contagious viral illness, to be eliminated from countries in the Americas. This includes all the countries in North, South and Central America, and the Caribbean.
Elimination of measles in the Americas means that there are no more measles cases originating in those countries.
In Malawi, the HIV rate among their children has dropped by 67%.
According to UNAIDS, there has been a reduction in new infections. Malawi’s treatment programme, which began in 2004, has reportedly saved 260,000 lives.
Crucially, it has seen a 67 percent reduction in the number of children acquiring HIV, the biggest success story across all sub-Saharan nations
