Words by Smiley Team
If you weren’t aware of it already: we love to share positive news and stories of people doing good in the world.
Once a week, we’ll give you a round-up of five positive things that have happened that week that you might have missed – to leave you ending the week on a high.
From lost dogs to healthy brains, here’s this week’s round-up.
It's been dubbed a “Paris-style” strategy, and has goals drawn up by the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). These include eliminating plastic pollution, protecting a minimum of 30% of the world’s oceans and land, and reducing pesticide use by two-thirds.
The overarching goal of the CBD is to reverse the ecological destruction of the planet by 2030. The most recent draft of the agreement will be analysed by governments before a key summit in Kunming, China. The summit is hoped to take place in October.
The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has launches the first double-decker hydrogen bus fleet in England. These will reduce Transport for London’s carbon footprint and further reduce harmful emissions to help ensure Londoners breathe cleaner air.
The 20 new environmentally-friendly buses will produce no pollution from their exhausts and join more than 500 electric buses in the core fleet which are already zero-emission. The new hydrogen fuel cell double decker buses are first being introduced on route 7 between East Acton and Oxford Circus.
We have another reason for you to encourage yourself off the sofa and for a walk outdoors: it’s good for your brain! Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development followed six adults over six months, tracking their daily behaviours while taking MRI scans of their brains.
“Our results show that our brain structure and mood improve when we spend time outdoors. This most likely also affects concentration, working memory, and the psyche as a whole,” says lead author Simone Kühn, a psychologist and neuroscientist at the institute.
A family who lost their dog while on holiday were over the moon when months later, he returned. The Battistas family, from New York, put posters up and shared that he was missing back in July 2020. They also set up the #FindFisher Facebook page. And it worked.
In April 2021, Wayne Horn, who lives in Baltimore City, noticed a stray dog in the road. He temporarily looked after the dog and when he posted a picture on Facebook, people alerted him that it was the same dog from the #FindFisher page. A reunion with the family was arranged and, well, there were smiles all around.
Researchers in San Francisco have developed a speech "neuroprosthesis” that enabled a man with severe paralysis to communicate in sentences. It translated signals from his brain to the vocal tract directly into words that appeared as text on a screen. Incredible.
The work follows research by UCSF neurosurgeon, Edward Chang, who has been developing a technology that allows people with paralysis to communicate. “To our knowledge, this is the first successful demonstration of direct decoding of full words from the brain activity of someone who is paralysed and cannot speak,” said Chang, who’s senior author on the study.
Image credit: Dr Markuss1 / Shutterstock
