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LEGO Factory is Now Producing Thousands of Protective Plastic Face Masks for Medical Workers

By
McKinley Corbley
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The LEGO Group is offering their assistance to healthcare workers on the frontlines of the COVID-19 crisis by using their facilities to produce thousands of protective facial visors.

According to an Instagram post that was published by LEGO earlier this week, the company’s Billund-based factory in Denmark has reworked some of their machinery to make more than 13,000 plastic masks per day. The masks will reportedly be distributed to hospitals and medical facilities across the country.

Although these visors do not offer the same kind of protection as N95 masks, individuals and businesses around the world have been producing the plastic shields—as well as homemade cloth masks—for medical workers to use as additional protection in high-risk areas.

“This week we began to make visors at our factory in Billund for healthcare workers on the frontline in Denmark,” wrote the company. “We are so incredibly proud of the team who made this happen. They worked around the clock to create designs and make moulds that can produce more than 13,000 visors a day. We are grateful to have such talented, dedicated and caring colleagues.”

LOOK: College Student Has Been Sewing Free Face Masks For Communicating With Hearing-Impaired Folks

LEGO also announced this week that they would be donating 500,000 brick sets to children in need during the novel coronavirus outbreaks. The company did not specify how the sets would be distributed, but they did ask their social media fans to show additional support to the NHS by building a LEGO brick rainbow in solidarity.

This is not the first time that corporations have stepped forward to help during the COVID-19 crisis. Famed engineer and inventor James Dyson designed a ventilator for the UK government in just 10 days—and then he volunteered to donate 5,000 of the devices. IKEA staffers also donated 50,000 N95 masks to a Swedish hospital after they discovered the coveted masks collecting dust in a warehouse. A Chinese tech company sent tens of thousands of respirator masks to Italian hospitals hard-hit by the virus. The New England Patriots even made headlines last week after they used their private team jet to transport 1.2 million N95 masks from China to New York and Boston hospitals in need.

This is just one of many positive stories and updates that are coming out of the COVID-19 news coverage this week. For more uplifting coverage on the outbreaks, click here.

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Rube Goldberg’s Granddaughter is Asking You to Build a Machine That Drops a Bar of Soap into Your Hand

By
McKinley Corbley
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Engineer and cartoonist Rube Goldberg was renowned for illustrating overly-complex machines that were designed exclusively for simple household tasks.

Now, his granddaughter Jennifer George is inviting architects and engineers of all ages to make their own Rube Goldberg Machine while they are at home in quarantine.

Although participants in this year’s Rube Goldberg Machine Contest were originally supposed to design a machine that turned on a light switch, the novel coronavirus outbreaks inspired George to task participants with building a machine that drops a bar of soap into someone’s hand in just 10 to 20 steps.

RELATED: Still Bored in Quarantine? This Website Makes It Really Easy to Learn Morse Code

“It just seemed like the right task,” George told CBC. “Everyone has got a bar of soap somewhere in their house. And Rube Goldberg machines are made from everyday objects. So you don’t have to go shopping. You don’t have to buy anything.

“You just have to figure out a fun, sort of interesting way to [take] something you’ve looked at for years, turn it upside down and see if it has inherent kinetic properties. And hopefully it does.”

LOOK: Isolated Art Lovers Are Recreating Masterpieces Using Everyday Objects—and the Results Are Amazing

The annual contest, which is free and open to all ages, requires participants to take a continuous video of their machine in action. Once the video is uploaded to YouTube, participants can send the links to the Rube Goldberg website.

The contest will be open to international submissions until May 31st, after which three machine designs will be selected as the winners in mid-June. In addition to the winners being featured as the star engineers of the contest on the Rube Goldberg website, they will also receive a free swag bag from the organization.

(WATCH the contest introduction video below)

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“With your hands carve out your own destiny.” – Guru Nanak (born 551 years ago today)

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Good News Network
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Quote of the Day: “With your hands carve out your own destiny.” – Guru Nanak (born 551 years ago today)

Photo: by Josh Hild – public domain, cropped

With a new inspirational quote every day, atop the perfect photo—collected and archived on our Quote of the Day page—why not bookmark GNN.org for a daily uplift?

99-Year-Old WWII Veteran Raises $3.3 Million for Hospital Workers Simply By Walking Laps of His Garden

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Good News Network
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An English World War II veteran who has been walking laps around his back garden has raised over £2.6 million pounds ($3.3 million) for the NHS in just one week.

[UPDATE 4/20: He went on to raise 10x that much – After WWII Vet Makes History By Raising $33 Million for NHS, People Are Calling for Him to Be Knighted]

99-year-old Tom Moore says the NHS have been “marvelous” in helping him recover from a hip replacement and skin cancer on his head over the last couple of years.

As a way of saying thank you, the former civil engineer has been doing daily laps of his 25-meter-long (82-foot) garden with the aim of walking 100 lengths by his 100th birthday on April 30th.

Moore, who began his walks last Monday on April 6th, initially set a fundraising target of £1,000 for NHS Charities Together with the sole expectation of garnering support from his village of Marston Moretaine, Bedfordshire.

RELATED: Tyler Perry Picks Up the Tab for All Groceries Purchased During Senior Shopping Hour at 73 Supermarkets

After hitting international headlines last week, however, Moore has quickly smashed through his target and has now raised over millions for frontline health workers fighting the novel coronavirus.

“I thank the British public from the bottom of my heart,” Moore told BBC. “It’s difficult to imagine all these kind people who have donated so far. It’s just amazing.”

Moore’s daughter Hannah Ingram-Moore, who set up the fundraising page for him, has had to raise his target three different times from £1,000 to £100,000, then to £250,000 and £500,000.

LOOK: Man Uses His Savings to Fill Up Gas Tanks For Dozens of Nurses Heading to Nearby Hospital

She later took to Twitter to say: “We are overwhelmed by the response. It’s extraordinary.”

Although Moore has already smashed his original donation goal, he is now hoping to complete another 100 laps of his yard to continue raising money for the NHS. To support Moore’s charity efforts, be sure and visit his Just Giving crowdfunding page.

This is just one of many positive stories and updates that are coming out of the COVID-19 news coverage this week. For more uplifting coverage on the outbreaks, click here.

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Stressed? This Study Says You Simply Need a 20-Minute ‘Nature Pill’

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Good News Network
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If you are feeling particularly anxious today, this study from 2019 says that taking at least twenty minutes out of your day to stroll or sit in a place that makes you feel in contact with nature will significantly lower your stress hormone levels.

“For the first time” ever, researchers conducted a study on the most effective dose of an urban nature experience to counteract the effects of modern stress.

Healthcare practitioners are now free to use this discovery, published in Frontiers in Psychology, to prescribe “nature-pills” with the knowledge that they have a real measurable effect on stress.

“We know that spending time in nature reduces stress, but until now, it was unclear how much is enough, how often to do it, or even what kind of nature experience will benefit us,” says Dr. Mary Carol Hunter, an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan and lead author of the research. “Our study shows that for the greatest payoff, in terms of efficiently lowering levels of the stress hormone cortisol, you should spend 20 to 30 minutes sitting or walking in a place that provides you with a sense of nature.”

LOOK: How a Yoga Teacher is Saving First Responders Across America From Depression—With Downward Dog

At the time, the researchers said that nature pills could be a low-cost solution to reduce the negative health impacts stemming from growing urbanization and indoor lifestyles dominated by screen viewing. To assist healthcare practitioners looking for evidence-based guidelines on what exactly to dispense, Hunter and her colleagues designed an experiment that would give a realistic estimate of an effective dose.

Over an 8-week period, participants were asked to take a nature pill with a duration of 10 minutes or more, at least 3 times a week. Levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, were measured from saliva samples taken before and after a nature pill, once every two weeks.

“Participants were free to choose the time of day, duration, and the place of their nature experience, which was defined as anywhere outside that in the opinion of the participant, made them feel like they’ve interacted with nature. There were a few constraints to minimize factors known to influence stress: take the nature pill in daylight, no aerobic exercise, and avoid the use of social media, internet, phone calls, conversations and reading,” Hunter explains.

MORE: The Science Behind Why We Need More of the ‘Secret Sauce’ of Kindness

She continues, “Building personal flexibility into the experiment allowed us to identify the optimal duration of a nature pill, no matter when or where it is taken, and under the normal circumstances of modern life, with its unpredictability and hectic scheduling.”

“We also accommodated day-to-day differences in a participant’s stress status by collecting four snapshots of cortisol change due to a nature pill,” says Hunter. “It also allowed us to identify and account for the impact of the ongoing, natural drop in cortisol level as the day goes on, making the estimate of effective duration more reliable.”

The data revealed that just a 20-minute nature experience was enough to significantly reduce cortisol levels—but if you spent a little more time immersed in a nature experience, 20 to 30 minutes sitting or walking, cortisol levels dropped at their greatest rate. After that, additional de-stressing benefits continued to add up but at a slower rate.

CHECK OUT: Watching Birds Near Your Home is Good For Your Mental Health

“Healthcare practitioners can use our results as an evidence-based rule of thumb on what to put in a nature-pill prescription,” says Hunter. “It provides the first estimates of how nature experiences impact stress levels in the context of normal daily life. It breaks new ground by addressing some of the complexities of measuring an effective nature dose.”

Hunter also voiced her hopes for the study to form the basis of further research in the same field.

“Our experimental approach can be used as a tool to assess how age, gender, seasonality, physical ability and culture influences the effectiveness of nature experiences on well-being. This will allow customized nature pill prescriptions, as well as a deeper insight on how to design cities and wellbeing programs for the public.”

Plant Some Positivity By Sharing The Research With Your Friends On Social Media – Feature photo by Marco Antonio Ibarra Neri, CC

Watch Tom Hanks Kick Off First Ever SNL Episode Filmed From Home With Sweet Intro About His Recovery

By
McKinley Corbley
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For the first time in 45 years of broadcasting, the beloved actors and comedians from the Saturday Night Live television show filmed an entire episode from the comfort of their quarantined homes.

It has been a month since the show stopped airing new episodes as a means of respecting social distancing amidst the COVID-19 outbreaks. Earlier this week, however, the cast finally rejoined audience members by contributing all of the episode’s sketches and clips from home.

The SNL cast members were not the only ones rejoining the public sphere; Tom Hanks—who has hosted a number of episodes in the past—kicked off the historic episode with a monologue discussing his brief hospitalization and recovery from the novel coronavirus in Australia.

LOOK: Jimmy Fallon Asks Twitter to Change Movie Titles Into Quarantine Editions and the List is Hilarious

“Ever since being diagnosed, I have been more like America’s dad than ever before,” Hanks said, “since no one wants to be around me very long and I make people uncomfortable.”

Furthermore, the cast was joined by previous comedic guest stars such as Larry David and Alec Baldwin, as well as Fred Armisen, Bill Hader, John Mulaney, Adam Sandler, Tina Fey, and Amy Poehler for a solemn musical memorial tribute to the show’s longtime musical director Hal Willner.

MORE: Watch These Self-Isolating Seniors Stave Off Boredom by Playing Life-Sized ‘Hungry, Hungry Hippos’

Regardless of the turbulent circumstances surrounding the show’s release, Hanks reassured viewers that the show was made with the intention of bringing some much-needed joy, laughter, and unity to the internet.

“Is it going to look a little different than what you’re used to?” he asked the camera. “Yes. Will it be weird to see sketches without big sets and costumes? Sure. But will it make you laugh? Eh—it’s SNL. There’ll be some good stuff, maybe one or two stinkers. You know the drill.”

To view the entire episode, check out the full playlist of sketches and segments on the SNL YouTube channel—or just get a taster by watching the Tom Hanks monologue below.

Multiply The Laughter By Sharing This With Your Friends On Social Media…

Exciting New Data Says Renewables Accounted for Almost Three Quarters of New Energy Capacity in 2019

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Good News Network
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In an exciting reported victory for sustainability, new renewable power accounted for a whopping 72% of all global power expansion in 2019.

According to new data released last week by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), the renewable energy sector added 176 gigawatts (GW) of generating capacity globally in 2019, although this was notably lower than the (revised) 179 GW added in 2018.

However, IRENA’s annual Renewable Capacity Statistics 2020 shows that renewables expanded by 7.6% last year with Asia dominating growth and accounting for 54% of total additions. While expansion of renewables slowed last year, total renewable power growth outpaced fossil fuel growth by a factor of 2.6, continuing the dominance of renewables in power expansion first established in 2012. Solar and wind contributed 90% of total renewable capacity added in 2019.

RELATED: Newly-Developed Enzyme That Breaks Down Plastic Bottles in Hours is On Track to Change the Recycling Game

“Renewable energy is a cost-effective source of new power that insulates power markets and consumers from volatility, supports economic stability and stimulates sustainable growth,” said IRENA Director-General Francesco La Camera. “With renewable additions providing the majority of new capacity last year, it is clear that many countries and regions recognize the degree to which the energy transition can deliver positive outcomes.

“While the trajectory is positive, more is required to put global energy on a path with sustainable development and climate mitigation—both of which offer significant economic benefits,” continued Mr. La Camera. “At this challenging time, we are reminded of the importance of building resilience into our economies. In what must be the decade of action, enabling policies are needed to increase investments and accelerate renewables adoption.”

CHECK OUT: Bill Gates Has Just Invested in a Company That Grows Palm Oil in a Lab to Save the Rainforests

Renewables accounted for at least 70% of total capacity expansion in almost all regions in 2019, other than in Africa and the Middle East, where they represented 52% and 26% of net additions respectively.

The additions took the renewable share of all global power capacity to 34.7%, up from 33.3% at the end of 2018. Non-renewable capacity expansion globally followed long-term trends in 2019, with net growth in Asia, the Middle East and Africa, and net decommissioning in Europe and North America.

MORE: Impelled by Reactor Meltdown, Fukushima Japan Vows to Achieve 100% Renewable Energy Use in 20 Years

Solar added 98 GW in 2019, 60% of which was in Asia. Wind energy expanded by close to 60 GW led by growth in China (26 GW) and the United States (9 GW). The two technologies now generate 623 GW and 586 GW respectively—close to half of global renewable capacity. Hydropower, bioenergy, geothermal and marine energy displayed modest year on year expansion of 12 GW, 6 GW, 700 MW, and 500 MW respectively.

Asia was responsible for over half of new installations despite expanding at a slightly slower pace than in 2018. Growth in Europe and North America increased year on year. Africa added 2 GW of renewable capacity in 2019, half of the 4 GW it installed in 2018.

Want to learn more? Read the “Highlights of the key findings” or the full IRENA report.

Reprinted from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA)

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17-Year-Old ‘Angel’ Cashier Picks Up $173 Grocery Bill for Senior Shopper Who Found Himself Short on Cash

By
McKinley Corbley
-

This 17-year-old grocery store cashier is being hailed for going above and beyond the call of duty to help a senior shopper named Layne McKeel.

McKeel hasn’t been able to get out of his house very much since the start of the novel coronavirus outbreaks. He had just picked up his disability payment last week when he decided to go get some food and supplies from the Fresh n’ Low supermarket in Georgetown, Tennessee.

The young grocery store employee named Elizabeth Taylor had just finished ringing up McKeel at checkout when he was distressed to find himself $33 short of his final $173 bill.

RELATED: Teens Launch Hotline for Isolated Seniors to Listen to Pre-Recorded Jokes, Stories, and Messages of Hope

After explaining his dilemma to Elizabeth, McKeel was about to put some of his items back on the shelf—but before he could, she simply insisted on paying for all of his groceries instead.

“It was all essential stuff so I was just like… you know… and he was like ‘what do I owe you?’ And I was like no, it’s fine, I’ll take care of it, it’s okay,” Elizabeth recalled to WRCB.

When asked about what inspired her to show such kindness towards a stranger, Elizabeth simply shrugged and said: “We’ve seen a lot of older people, and they’re all trying to buy groceries and a lot of places have ran out of stuff, and so the older people are kind of taking the downfall for that. I just try to give back when I can.”

MORE: Tyler Perry Picks Up the Tab for All Groceries Purchased During Senior Shopping Hour at 73 Supermarkets

McKeel, on the other hand, was extremely touched by the gesture, calling her an “angel” and “the light of day”.

This is just one of many positive stories and updates that are coming out of the COVID-19 news coverage this week. For more uplifting coverage on the outbreaks, click here.

(WATCH the news coverage below)

Be Sure And Share This Sweet Story Of Kindness With Your Friends On Social Media…

“It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done.” – Vincent van Gogh

By
Good News Network
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By Carles Rabada

Quote of the Day: “It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done.” – Vincent van Gogh

Photo: by Carles Rabada – public domain, cropped

With a new inspirational quote every day, atop the perfect photo—collected and archived on our Quote of the Day page—why not bookmark GNN.org for a daily uplift?

Teens Launch Hotline for Isolated Seniors to Listen to Pre-Recorded Jokes, Stories, and Messages of Hope

By
McKinley Corbley
-

As a means of entertaining lonely adults during the novel coronavirus outbreaks, a team of Canadian high schoolers created a hotline that plays pre-recorded messages of positivity.

The Joy4All project was launched by students from the Ever Active Schools recreational leadership program run by the Calgary Board of Education.

The youngsters say they created the free hotline as a means of comforting quarantined seniors across North America. However, people of all ages are encouraged to dial 1-877-JOY-4ALL in order to enjoy the regularly updated selection of jokes, stories, guided mediations, and educational messages.

LOOK: Family Cheers Up Neighborhood By Spending 6 Hours Coloring Each Brick of Their House With Rainbow Chalk

Since the hotline launched earlier this week, the youngsters will now be updating the pre-recorded content until June; although if social restrictions continue throughout the summer, then the teens hope to continue adding to the phone selections until adults are free from self-isolation.

“A lot of folks who are in isolation are really missing their families right now,” Ever Active Schools teacher Jamie Anderson told CBC. “So we’re just trying to fill in some of the gaps and bring them a little bit of joy and levity during these difficult times.”

Youngsters are also encouraged to submit their own messages and recordings through the Joy4All website.

MORE: New Jersey Teens Take Matters into Their Own Hands to Help First Responders and Small Businesses Amidst COVID-19 Crisis

“Children and youth can submit their own written messages, content, and even recordings!” reads the website. “We encourage kindness, creativity, and diverse messages of joy, especially for our Indigenous elders in isolation as well as seniors who are newcomers, immigrants, and refugees.”

This is just one of many positive stories and updates that are coming out of the COVID-19 news coverage this week. For more uplifting coverage on the outbreaks, click here.

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Anonymous Donor Gives Away $82,000 Worth of Gift Cards to All 1,400 Residents of Small Iowa Town

By
McKinley Corbley
-
Photo by Mayor Jeff Lillie

An anonymous donor is being praised for giving away more than $82,000 in food-related gift cards to every single household in a small Iowa town.

Amidst the COVID-19 shutdowns, the residents of Earlham—a city 30 miles west of downtown Des Moines with a population of 1,450 people—have been struggling to cope with shuttered businesses and social restrictions.

That’s why Earlham Mayor Jeff Lillie was astonished to receive a call from a friend in late March saying that an unidentified benefactor wanted to pump some money into the local economy by giving away gift cards to local businesses.

RELATED: Tyler Perry Picks Up the Tab for All Groceries Purchased During Senior Shopping Hour at 73 Supermarkets

At first, the donor wanted to give away 100 gift cards to West Side Bar and Grille, local grocery store Hometown Market, and the newly-opened Trostel’s Broken Branch restaurant. An hour after discussing his plans with the mayor, the donor upped his offer to 250; another hour later, he said he wanted to donate 500 gift cards. When Mayor Lillie mentioned that there were 549 households in town, the donor agreed to give gift cards to every single Earlham family.

To Lillie’s astonishment, however, the donor did not just end up giving a single gift card to every household—he ended up giving away $50 gift cards for each local business to every Earlham residence.

In total, the anonymous benefactor bought more than $27,000 worth of gift cards from the three businesses.

CHECK OUT: Bill Gates is Now Building Factories to Produce 7 of the Most Promising COVID-19 Vaccines

Upon confirming the purchases with the three businesses, Lillie said that he immediately broke down in tears.

“[There are] bad things that have been happening,” he told the Des Moines Register. “As the mayor of a small town, making the decision to close our community centers and city hall and our library and all of the other bad decisions that we’ve been forced to make—and then here’s this really great thing. It just tore down my walls.”

“Financially, it’s one of the biggest things that’s ever happened to this small town,” he added.

CHECK OUT: Hourly Workers at Largest Grocery Chain in US Are All Getting ‘Hero Bonuses’ for Their Service Amid COVID-19

For a week, Lillie kept the initiative a secret. Then earlier this month, hundreds of town residents were stunned to find $150 worth of gift cards sitting in their mailbox.

Trostel’s Broken Ranch owner Jennifer Trostel told CNN that her business may not have been able to survive the coronavirus shutdowns if it had not been for the donation.

“It gave us hope,” she said. “To be able to pay our bills and know that it’s OK, we don’t have to close our doors forever. We’ll be here when this is over. I don’t think we could be able to say that without the donation.”

LOOK: Mystery Mom Has Been Leaving Out Free Bagged Lunches ‘Made With Love’ for Anyone Who May Need Them

Mayor Lillie now hopes that the story’s publicity will help to convey his gratitude towards the anonymous benefactor—although when CNN asked Lillie what he would say to the benefactor if he had the chance to meet them, the mayor simply said he “couldn’t find the words.”

“I would tell them thank you 549 times,” Lillie told the news outlet. “It would be like meeting a hero.”

This is just one of many positive stories and updates that are coming out of the COVID-19 news coverage this week. For more uplifting coverage on the outbreaks, click here.

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Metal Surfaces Can Now Be Instant Bacteria Killers, Thanks to New Laser Treatment Technique

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Good News Network
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Bacterial pathogens can live on surfaces for days—but what if frequently touched surfaces such as doorknobs could instantly kill them off?

Purdue University engineers have created a laser treatment method that could potentially turn any metal surface into a rapid bacteria killer—just by giving the metal’s surface a different texture.

In a study published in the journal Advanced Materials Interfaces, the researchers demonstrated that this technique allows the surface of copper to immediately kill off superbugs such as MRSA.

RELATED: Irish Researchers Have Developed Hospital Robot That Uses UV Light to Kill Viruses, Bacteria, and Germs

“Copper has been used as an antimicrobial material for centuries. But it typically takes hours for native copper surfaces to kill off bacteria,” said Rahim Rahimi, a Purdue assistant professor of materials engineering.

“We developed a one-step laser-texturing technique that effectively enhances the bacteria-killing properties of copper’s surface.”

The technique is not yet tailored to killing viruses such as the one responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic, which are much smaller than bacteria.

Laser treating copper — Photo by Purdue University / Erin Easterling

Since publishing this work, however, Rahimi’s team has begun testing this technology on the surfaces of other metals and polymers that are used to reduce risks of bacterial growth and biofilm formation on devices such as orthopedic implants or wearable patches for chronic wounds.

Giving implants an antimicrobial surface would prevent the spread of infection and antibiotic resistance, Rahimi said, because there wouldn’t be a need for antibiotics to kill off bacteria from an implant’s surface.

The technique might apply to metallic alloys that also are known to have antimicrobial properties.

CHECK OUT: From Terrifying to Terrific—Man Redesigns MRI Machine to Delight Children Instead of Scare Them

Metals such as copper normally have a really smooth surface, which makes it difficult for the metal to kill bacteria by contact.

The technique developed by Rahimi’s team uses a laser to create nanoscale patterns on the metal’s surface. The patterns produce a rugged texture that increases surface area, allowing more opportunity for bacteria to hit the surface and rupture on the spot.

Researchers in the past have used various nanomaterial coatings to enhance the antimicrobial properties of metal surfaces, but these coatings are prone to leach off and can be toxic to the environment.

MORE: After Couple Publishes 3D-Printing Guide for Face Masks, Hundreds of Volunteers Start Making Them for Free

“We’ve created a robust process that selectively generates micron and nanoscale patterns directly onto the targeted surface without altering the bulk of the copper material,” said Rahimi, whose lab develops innovative materials and biomedical devices to address health care challenges.

The laser-texturing has a dual effect: The technique not only improves direct contact, but also makes a surface more hydrophilic. For orthopedic implants, such a surface allows bone cells to more strongly attach, improving how well the implant integrates with bone. Rahimi’s team observed this effect with fibroblast cells.

Due to the simplicity and scalability of the technique, the researchers believe that it could easily be translated into existing medical device manufacturing processes.

Reprinted from Purdue University

(WATCH the explanatory video below)

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Beloved Opera Singer Unites Millions of Viewers With Livestreamed Easter Performance in Empty Cathedral

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Good News Network
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Despite how millions of Italian families were quarantined inside their homes on Easter Sunday, famed opera singer Andrea Bocelli accepted an invitation to perform a livestreamed holiday concert as a musical message of hope for the world.

As a means of respecting social distancing, Bocelli was filmed singing to an empty Duomo di Milano—the largest cathedral in the country—as it was devoid of any spectators save for the cathedral organist.

“On the day we celebrate the trust in a life that triumphs, I’m honored and happy to answer ‘si,’ to the invitation of the City and the Duomo of Milan,” Bocelli said during the intro of the video. “Thanks to music, streamed live, bringing together millions of clasped hands everywhere in the world, we will hug this wounded Earth’s pulsing heart.”

WATCH: In Historic Televised Speech, Queen Elizabeth II Offers Message of Global Support—‘We will succeed’

Bocelli then offered tear-jerking renditions of “Panis Angelicus,” “Ave Maria,” “Sancta Maria,” “Domine Deus,” and finally, an a cappella version of “Amazing Grace”.

Since the video was broadcasted yesterday afternoon, it has been viewed more than 27 million times.

The 61-year-old singer—who has been blind since age 12—also used the “Music for Hope: Live From Duomo di Milano” concert as a means of raising thousands of dollars for healthcare workers fighting COVID-19.

LOOK: Family Cheers Up Neighborhood By Spending 6 Hours Coloring Each Brick of Their House With Rainbow Chalk

Over the course of the last three weeks leading up to the concert, the Andrea Bocelli Foundation has managed to raise €230,400 ($250,000) on their GoFundMe page for Italian medial teams.

This is just one of many positive stories and updates that are coming out of the COVID-19 news coverage this week. For more uplifting coverage on the outbreaks, click here.

(WATCH the breathtaking concert below)

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Aspiring Barista Uses Coffee Shop Supplies to Make Free Drinks for Essential Workers From His Window

By
McKinley Corbley
-

Rather than twiddling his thumbs in self-isolation, this aspiring San Francisco barista has been making free coffee for essential workers passing by his window.

Prior to the novel coronavirus shutdowns across California, Ben Ramirez had been taking barista classes with the hopes of eventually opening up his own coffee shop.

Since Ramirez has been forced to stay inside his home on Pfeiffer street, he decided to use his abundance of brewing supplies and ingredients to make free coffee for mailmen, hospital staffers, and other essential workers walking past his window.

Ramirez is careful to maintain social distancing guidelines by using a toy gorilla arm that he borrowed from his son to pass the coffee to his visitors.

RELATED: Tyler Perry Picks Up the Tab for All Groceries Purchased During Senior Shopping Hour at 73 Supermarkets

“I’ve always wanted to do something out of this window,” Ramirez told WABC in the interview below. “You know we have this nice small street where everyone knows each other.”

If you’re inspired to run a similar labor of love out of your household window, Ramirez says he has been advertising to passerby simply by setting out a sidewalk sign that reads: “FREE COFFEE!”

This is just one of many positive stories and updates that are coming out of the COVID-19 news coverage this week. For more uplifting coverage on the outbreaks, click here.

(WATCH the news coverage below)

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“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” – Thomas Merton (The Met turns 150 today)

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Good News Network
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Quote of the Day: “Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” – Thomas Merton (The Met turns 150 today)

Photo: by Steve Johnson – public domain

With a new inspirational quote every day, atop the perfect photo—collected and archived on our Quote of the Day page—why not bookmark GNN.org for a daily uplift?

In Groundbreaking Vote for Sustainability, EU Moves to Approve Insects for Human Consumption

By
Andy Corbley
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Chirps Chips submitted

As famed adventure television host, world record holder, former British Special Forces operator, and all around feel-good motivational guy Bear Grylls repeatedly reminded us on his television programs Man vs Wild and Running Wild, insects have more protein than beef or fish—sometimes as much as 8x more, if measured pound for pound.

After a long television career of pounding back worms, grubs, spiders, crickets, and ants for our amusement, Grylls would certainly be applauding the new proposed European Union legislation that would allow for mealworms, lesser mealworms, crickets, and locusts to be sold as “novel food sources,” pumping life into an industry that, while small, produces 500 tons of food annually according to The Guardian.

The products include things like cricket protein bars, locust aperitif, or mealworm burgers, and the new regulations from the European Food Safety Authority are likely to open the floodgates for insect food to flow from countries where they are made like Holland, the UK, Denmark, Belgium, and Finland, into countries where they are banned, such as Italy, France, and Spain.

“We reckon these authorizations will be a breakthrough for the sector,” Christophe Derrien, secretary general of the International Platform of Insects for Food and Feed, added.

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Companies in the Netherlands, France, Switzerland and Spain are all preparing to ramp up operations to prepare for the demand, perceiving through market signals that people actually want insect food.

Unlike factory farming, insects can be raised humanely in cities, without antibiotics or growth hormones. Chirps Chips, for instance, uses crickets milled into a flour to make high-protein tortilla chips – and they’re delicious, with three times more protein and 40% less fat than a regular chip.

And, now the snack is backed by Mark Cuban after the company’s young CEO, Rose Wang, won a deal on “Shark Tank“—with the snack being sold on thousands of store shelves across the nation in flavors like BBQ and cheddar.

Chirps Chips submitted

An Obvious Solution

Insects have been part of the staple diet of many world cultures, even now in modern times. They represent a rich source of animal protein that is practically immune to extinction, and just like traditionally harvested animals are perfectly safe to eat if you can control the conditions in which they live.

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With some of the most basic brain functions of anything in kingdom Animalia, insects are also less-likely to offend the sensibilities of vegetarians who, being more likely to be vitamin B12 deficient than omnivores, might be able to utilize the occasional cricket bar as a means of supplementing their plant based diet with bioavailable and dietary sources of B12 which can’t be made by plants, coming only from bacteria which live on plants.

Furthermore, unlike hoofed mammals, the process of enteric fermentation which, using the United States as an example, accounts for a small percentage of total greenhouse gas emissions (about 2.5% in the U.S.) is absent in insect agriculture, and so there’s a small potential reduction in GHG emissions to be gained from a switch.

Lastly trillions of insects are killed every year both by combine-harvesters and pesticides to protect major crops like wheat, rice, soya, corn, and cotton, representing millions of tons of lost nutrients. And, in a world where many communities are protein-deficient, insect products might never be more needed.

Multiply The Good By Sharing The Exciting News With Your Friends On Social Media — Photo by Chirps Chips

Newly-Developed Enzyme That Breaks Down Plastic Bottles in Hours is On Track to Change the Recycling Game

By
Andy Corbley
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Photo by Carbios

Utilizing an enzyme found within composted leaves, scientists are now breaking down plastic all the way into a recyclable form in a matter of hours.

Carbios, the French company responsible for the breakthrough, is already collaborating with Pepsi and L’Oréal to unleash industrial market-scale production of the new substance within five years.

“We are the first company to bring this technology on the market,” the deputy chief executive at Carbios, Martin Stephan, told The Guardian. “Our goal is to be up and running by 2024–2025, at large industrial scale.”

Their discovery, which sources described as a major advance, joins an arsenal of solutions for plastic pollution control that have appeared over the last decade.

Just like Boyan Slat who took on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, or the bracelet folks at 4Ocean who took on the problem of ocean pollution in rivers, the scientists from the University of Toulouse are applying their breakthrough to another part of the problem—the recycling of plastic.

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Plastic isn’t straightforward to recycle. There are common varieties of plastic made from multiple layers of different esters, each one requiring different equipment or temperature to breakdown. And, there are a lot of plastic esters that could be recycled but aren’t because the market value for the recycled material is so low it can’t financially sustain the operation.

In the scientist’s paper published in Nature, they detail how poly(ethylene terephthalate) PET, the most common polyester plastic, loses much of its mechanical utility when heated for recycling. Therefore, creating new material is preferred, and PET waste continues to accumulate.

Their new enzyme achieves a minimum of 90% de-polymerization in just 10 hours, meaning that the polymers—large complex particles, become monomers—small single particles in less than a day, and perhaps even more amazing, end up as biologically depolymerized plastic that can actually be reused to create things like plastic bottles.

LOOK: Cameroon Man Uses Wasted Plastic Bottles to Build Canoes for Fishermen in Need

While manufacturing plastic bottles from recycled PET made by this enzyme would cost about 4% of the amount needed to make new bottles from fresh petroleum, the recycling infrastructure, including the grounding up and heating of the plastic bottles before the enzyme is added would still make it more expensive in the end.

Nevertheless, the future is bright for this technology. Co-enzymes could be synthesized, companies could produce more inexpensive recycling infrastructure—both of which could finally bring down the cost of producing recycled plastic goods.

Carbios has also begun tackling the normally unrecyclable plastic film problem. In an alliance with several other European companies under the name Carbiolice, they demonstrated a plastic film last year that can be compostable in home or municipal compost piles. Their objective will be to address the markets of plastic films and single-use bags—and later on, rigid packaging and disposable tableware.

“These milestones reinforce our ambition to offer the market circular economy solutions that are both competitive and eco-friendly, and which will revolutionize the end of life for plastics and textiles.”

Reduce Negativity By Recycling The Good News And Sharing It With Your Friends On Social Media…

For First Time in History, AI Learns to Translate Silent Human Brain Activity into Text for Locked-In Syndrome Patients

By
Andy Corbley
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Fotolia licensed image

Have you ever heard of locked-in syndrome? Sometimes called pseudocoma, it describes a rare condition where the patient is “locked-in” their body. They are aware, but cannot act in the world due to complete paralysis of all voluntary muscles in the body, but with a normal exception being their eyes.

Neuroscientists have just created an artificially intelligent algorithm that detects human brain activity and translates it into English sentences—and they said it was the first time such translations could be done on a 1:1 speed with natural human speech; faster-than-light.

This breakthrough technology allows for work to begin in many different areas, but particularly for people with locked-in syndrome so they can communicate with the outside world. Another study last year was able to decode brain waves in people who were listening or hearing sounds. This new research is creating translations of one’s thoughts while reading silently.

The researchers from UC San Francisco have published their first paper describing the new machine-learning translation technology by studying people who were reading short prepared sentences.

With vocabularies of about 250 words in 50 different sentence groupings, the error rate was less than 3% for some of the translations. However, as more words were added the accuracy level of the predictions from the decoding machine dropped.

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Dr. Joseph Makin, co-author of the research from UC San Francisco, told The Guardian this could be the basis of a speech prosthetic.

More than 20 years ago, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le Scaphandre et le Papillon) was published, the remarkable memoir of French journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby who detailed his day to day life after suffering a massive stroke which left him with the disorder.

Using the only methods available in Bauby’s time, he wrote the entire book by winking his left eye. Each word would take about 2 minutes to complete because he had to choose from an audio sequence of letters—blinking in order to select which one he wanted.

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Bauby would not live to see these new radical breakthroughs; two days after the book was published—while it was rocketing to become a European best seller—Bauby died of pneumonia.

Warp Speed Translations with the Infant AI

Over the course of the study, the AI became more and more accurate with its translations, having at first only spat out random clusters of words. It began to learn how to consistently link associated words together, as well as which words tended to follow others.

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It depended on the person to what degree the predictions from the machine were a success with one participant pushing the rate of error down below 3%, but compared with past attempts at making such a system it’s the most successful ever made.

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“Human infants learn much the same way, at first relying on the memorization of patterns of speech, rather than the breadth of the language, to communicate,” said Makin. “The AI would recognize patterns of brain activity and associate them with sentences, rather than identifying each individual word.

Like Jean-Dominque Bauby demonstrated in his book, even a human whose body has truly become a prison has a story to tell, and this technology would allow access to the thoughts of all manner of speech-impaired individuals.

Who knows how many books are waiting then to be written, or how many stories wait to be told?

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“Don’t be pushed around by the fears in your mind. Be led by the dreams in your heart.” – Roy T. Bennett

By
Good News Network
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Quote of the Day: “Don’t be pushed around by the fears in your mind. Be led by the dreams in your heart.” – Roy T. Bennett

Photo: by JR Korpa – public domain

With a new inspirational quote every day, atop the perfect photo—collected and archived on our Quote of the Day page—why not bookmark GNN.org for a daily uplift?

10-Year-Old Seeks to Empower Other Kids During COVID-19 Pandemic

By
Oyster19
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Like many kids who are stuck at home during the COVID-19 pandemic, ten-year-old Sydney was beginning to feel hopeless. But, instead of letting the feeling overtake her, she and her mom took action.

Sydney knew that she had information that would make a difference if she got it out to other kids her age. So, the pair set out to produce videos giving out valuable information.

From their living room they wrote, recorded, and animated Kids Coping with COVID-19 using Story Maker, an educational software that her mom, Melissa Dilling, uses in her classroom at Eisenhower Middle School in Everett, WA.

After covering what kids can do for fun and how to arrange playdates, the series covered a unique way that school students can help the hospitals around them.

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In the latest episode, Sydney empowers kids by suggesting that students e-mail their teachers or their schools to ask if there is any PPE (personal protective equipment) lying unused in science labs that the school can donate. Surplus PPE that a school might have in their science labs include gloves and goggles.

In Sydney’s words, “It never hurts to ask!”

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They suggest using a website, donateppe.org, for donating the supplies.

She hopes that when kids see her series on YouTube they feel like they can actually make a difference in their community—and the world—by following safety guidelines and seeking to help where they can.

(WATCH the video below…)

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