Quote of the Day: “Tough times never last, but tough people do.” – Dr. Robert Schuller
Photo: by McKinley Corbley
With a new inspirational quote every day, atop the perfect photo—collected and archived on our Quotes page—why not bookmark GNN.org for a daily uplift?
“Just wanted to say THANK YOU for existing! Thank you for spreading the love, the care, the good news and show the good in humans!!! If everyone makes a conscious choice of watching positive, uplifting contents, they wouldn’t be angry, depressed all the time. Each one of us can get inspired and influenced to make a good action. It doesn’t have to be huge. Just a little smile, hello in the elevator, holding the doors etc… The positivism and good actions can be contagious. Hope every one gets infected! Have a great day and god bless all!” –Christal Torres
Koolulam is an organization that is dedicated to bringing Israelis together from across all ages, races, religions, and demographics for mass singing events.
LOOK: Jewish Nurse Breastfeeds Palestinian Baby While Mother is Hospitalized
This most recent orchestration in Haifa asked 3,000 Muslims and Jews (none of whom had met before) to come together and learn the song “One Day” by Matisyahu in under an hour. Not only that, but they learned how to sing and harmonize the lyrics in three different languages.
The resulting concert, which was made in collaboration with Beit HaGefen, the Haifa Municipality, and the Port of Haifa, is a breathtaking display of unity and beauty.
(WATCH the video below)
Pass On This Story Of Peace To Your Friends: Click To Share
Robert and Ann Dobson have lived in the same house for 50 years – and for the first time ever, they received a citation from the city concerning the piles of trash littering their yard.
It’s not the Dobsons’ trash, however; whenever the wind picks up, the garbage from a nearby shopping center is blown into their yard.
The Dobsons have tried to keep their yard free of trash, but whenever they pick up the garbage, more trash takes its place.
Upon hearing that the the couple had received a citation for the litter, the students on the cross-country team from McQuaid Jesuit High School stopped by the senior’s house in Greece, New York on Saturday and picked up all the trash themselves. Not only that, but they installed a fence to prevent any more litter from being blown onto the lawn.
RELATED: When Kindergartener Has Her Shirt on Backwards, Classmates Are a Heartwarming Example of Kindness
Additionally, the teens and their parents worked together with city officials to require the shopping center trash cans to install locks on their dumpsters.
One of the teen’s parents told Rochester First: “It wasn’t just us; people were stopping. A women and a couple little girls stopped and helped with the trash cleanup and a man came over and helped with the fencing.”
(WATCH the interview below)
Clean Up Negativity: Click To Share The Story With Your Friends – Photo by Democrat and Chronicle
Egypt has begun construction on what will become the largest solar park in the world.
The Benban Solar Park is expected to generate between 1.6 to 2.0GW of solar power by the middle of 2019.
For years, Egypt has largely depended on inexpensive fossil fuels for its energy needs. Due to the falling prices of solar panel components, however, the country hopes to generate at least 20% of their energy needs from sustainable sources by 2022.
CHECK OUT: Transparent Cells Can Turn Any Glass Surface into Solar Panel, Even Car Windows
The project is currently being built on a 14.3 square-mile plot of land that will host 32 different power plants near Aswan, according to the IFC.
“This project will help Egypt tap into its massive potential for solar energy and scale back its use of expensive—and polluting—fossil fuels. That’s especially important with the specter of climate change looming,” says Mouayed Makhlouf, IFC Director for the Middle East and North Africa.
(WATCH the informative video below)
Shine Some Light On The Good News: Click To Share
Milkmen have always been a classic staple of English towns – and now, thanks to a BBC documentary about the planet, more and more London residents are returning to their roots and turning their business over to milkmen.
UK-based dairy delivery company Milk & More has seen a surge in business since the release of Blue Planet II, a David Attenborough-narrated series of nature documentaries.
RELATED: Heartfelt Letter From 5-Year-old Causes Restaurant Chain to Swap Plastic Straws for Paper
The show, which has already inspired a host of other environmentally-friendly initiatives, gives an in-depth look on the dangers of plastic pollution and why people need to use less wasteful forms of packaging.
According to the BBC, Milk & More has had 2,500 new customers since the release of Blue Planet II. The company’s website visits have also doubled.
Additionally, glass bottles were only requested by customers about 50% of the time. After the documentary’s release, over 90% of customers have requested glass milk bottles instead of plastic.
(WATCH the video below)
Deliver Some Positivity To Your Friends: Click To Share – Photo by BBC
It has been 38 years since Malcolm Alexander was outside of prison. But when he was finally exonerated and declared a free man last month, he was accompanied by the canine companion who had helped keep him sane on the inside.
Alexander was originally given a life sentence without parole for a crime that he did not commit in 1979. The Innocence Project, which is a nonprofit dedicated to freeing wrongfully-convicted inmates, assisted in proving Alexander’s innocence.
While he was behind bars, however, the dog of one of his convicted friends gave birth to a litter of 10 pups. Alexander adopted the runt of the litter because he said that “she needed the most love”.
Alexander named the dog “Innocent” and spent much of his time raising and adoring his canine companion in the common areas of the prison.
RELATED: Convict Learns Law, Wins Own Release, Now Works in Court of Appeals
After he was proven innocent by DNA-testing and released from prison, volunteers for The Innocence Project brought Innocent to Alexander’s house the next day – and their reunion is tearjerking.
“I feel beautiful,” Alexander told Inside Edition. “I feel happy, very happy. I feel happy for her.
“I told you we gonna be free,” he said to the joyful puppy. “This is the end and [it’s] complete.”
(WATCH the video below)
Click To Share The Pawesome Story With Your Friends (Photo by the Innocence Project)
Julie Deane started out as a mother who was simply determined to make enough money to pay for her bullied daughter to go to a better school. Because private school tuition for both her children would cost a whopping $31,000, her budget needed some creative thinking.
Deane’s path to success had its obstacles, but her iron will and determination helped the hardworking mother to overcome every challenge that stood in her way.
You can also LISTEN to this story as told by GNN’s Good News Guru —> HERE on KOST-103.5
She considered taking a chance on creating her own business, so the mum from Cambridge – who previously had worked as an accountant – made a spreadsheet of all the things that she might be good at. Because she always hated cheap, ugly school backpacks, she decided she would try and make her own satchels, and roused the courage to invest $775 in startup money.
First, she made a prototype out of cereal boxes and brown paper. Then, she created the logo for her company on Microsoft Paint. Instead of hiring a staff, she enlisted the help of her most trustworthy and hardworking companion: her mother.
Next, she started calling a school supply store every half hour for two days, pestering the worker for the name of his supplier. Once he had given up on resisting the persistent mother, he gave her the name of the supplier and she started paying the company to manufacture her design.
POPULAR: When Man Suddenly Collapses, People Line Up For 96-Minute CPR Marathon to Save Him
Over the course of two days, Deane taught herself how to code so she could create her own website – and for two years, she mostly received orders for her satchels from family and friends.
In 2010, she sent a few of her most colorful satchels to some fashion bloggers who were attending New York Fashion Week. She could not afford to fly to the states with her tight budget, but she still hoped that perhaps the satchels would attract some new customers.
Following the fabled fashion event, a shocked Deane was flooded with over 16,000 orders.
MORE: Instead of Trashing Groceries During Cooler Malfunction, Store Donates 35,000 Pounds of Food
The manufacturer that had been assembling the bags was too small to fulfill the massive influx of orders, so she approached a larger company for her production needs… that is, until she found out that the local firm was selling knockoffs of her designs on the street for a fraction of the price. When confronted about the issue, the owner of the company informed her that she didn’t have any other choice but to keep working with them.
“That sort of irritated me,” she told CNBC. “But then the next line was the real kicker: ‘Because you’re a stupid woman and you don’t know about manufacturing.’ And he was so pleased with himself. He turned on his heel and went out the back.”
Weeks later, Deane got her revenge after she fixed up a dilapidated warehouse location and hired almost every one of the employees from the manager who had scorned her.
The rest is basically history: ten years later, Deane is the CEO of Cambridge Satchel Company: a fashion brand that is worth over $65 million.
ALSO: Military Sons Tell Mom Not Every Soldier Gets Care Packages Like Them, So She Sends 10,000 Boxes
Her purses have been worn by dozens of celebrities, such as Zooey Deschanel, Alexa Chung, and Taylor Swift. In addition to meeting the Queen of England, Deane has been hailed as an entrepreneurial guru by Google, and Cambridge Satchel has five different retail locations in the U.K., with a net worth of $65 million since 2014.
And, needless to say, her daughter Emily attended the private school—and she was never again the victim of bullying.
(WATCH the inspiring interview below)
Click To Share The Story With Your Friends (Photo by The Pool / Cambridge Satchel Company)
Quote of the Day: “Many men go fishing all their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.” – Henry David Thoreau
Photo: by Patrick Franzis, CC license
With a new inspirational quote every day, atop the perfect photo—collected and archived on our Quotes page—why not bookmark GNN.org for a daily uplift?
The fast food giant that has served billions recently served up a big announcement: they will finally be phasing out the use of foam containers in all of their stores worldwide by the end of this year.
Additionally, the company plans on using 100% recycled fiber-based materials for all of their packaging by 2020.
Currently, only half of the restaurants’ packaging is collectively made up of the eco-friendly materials.
RELATED: Mealworms Love Eating Styrofoam! Breakthrough Discovery Best In 10 Years
By the end of 2018, McDonald’s will join the ranks of other companies, such as Dunkin’ Donuts and Jamba Juice, that have banned styrofoam from their production line.
The entirety of San Francisco has already banned styrofoam from being sold within city limits – and we hope it’s a matter of time before the rest of the world follows the Golden Arches into a greener day.
Clean Up Negativity: Click To Share With Your Friends (Photo by Mike Mozart, CC)
It goes without saying that it can be hard to adapt to civilian life after leaving prison.
Will Avila, who was in and out of jail over the course of 10 years, says he “went through 22 job applications and got rejected 22 times,” according to WTTG.
Unable to find someone willing to hire him, Avila decided to take matters into his own hands and start a business.
Avila now heads a company called Clean Decisions, a commercial cleaning service. Best of all, Avila’s success includes 15 full-time employees—all of whom are also former inmates.
One employee, Andre Thomas, told WTTG that the job has been instrumental in preventing him from turning back to his old ways.
He also started a nonprofit called Changing Perceptions, which pairs former inmates with mentors to keep them out of trouble.
Will’s hard work in turning his life around after prison, and helping convicts like himself, caught the attention of John Legend.
Legend has partnered with Bank of America, and an organization called New Profit, to support Clean Decisions with $50,000 in grant money. Other similar efforts are winning grants, too, so they can help more inmates, a mission that Legend supports “for personal reasons.”
The money is helpful — but the affirmation is even more important. Avila told WTTG: “My deepest fear was the community and society rejecting us as returning citizens… But for somebody like John Legend and all the support he has given us, it just opens the door.”
SHARE the inspiring news with your friends…
Quote of the Day: “Where is this fountain that throws out these flowers in such ceaseless ecstasy?” – Rabindranath Tagore
With a new inspirational quote every day, atop the perfect photo—collected and archived on our Quotes page—why not bookmark GNN.org for a daily uplift?
After being delivered prematurely by C-section and surviving three different operations, this baby has become the first infant in the UK to survive being born with her heart outside of her chest.
The lucky newborn, Vanellope Hope Wilkins was born with ectopia cordis: a rare condition in which the infant is not only born without a breastbone, but arrives with its heart on the outside of its body.
While most babies who are born with the disease tend to die within three days of being born, Vanellope is still thriving to this day. There have been multiple successful surgeries in the U.S, too.
RELATED: ‘Kate and Leo Saved My Life’—Now Cancer-Free, Young Mom Can Raise Her Baby, Thanks to Titanic Duo
Back when little Vanellope was born in November, doctors wrapped her heart in plastic to keep it sterile. After the lifesaving procedure, her parents were thrilled.
“If you saw her when she was first born, to where she is now and what they’ve done… It’s beyond a miracle isn’t it?”
(WATCH the video below)
Pass On The Miraculous Story To Your Friends – Photo by Reuters
When this bamboozled grandfather was unable to find his ringing phone, a group of his family members all joined in on the search for the missing contraption – until they found it in the most unlikely place.
Marcus Van Zeilstra of Elmhurst, Illinois filmed the increasingly confused reactions of his “Papa” as he looked for the phone back in November.
WATCH: 85-Year-old Italian Grandmother Hilariously Learns to Use Google Home: ‘Hey, Goo-goo’
Though it was not in any of Papa’s pockets, they could hear it ringing wherever he went.
Finally, after calling it several times and insisting that it must be stuck in his shirt, one of the persistent search party members discovered its peculiar hiding place – and it was not in his shirt.
(WATCH the amusing video below)
Click To Share The Sweet Video With Your Friends
When the students at Carmel Clay High School were asked to do something kind for their fellow classmates, they did not just rise to the occasion; they owned it.
Sarah Wolff, who teaches a ceramics class at the school in Carmel, Indiana, asked a group of her pupils to do something nice for their fellow students. She figured that – following the tragic events at the school in Parkland, Florida last week – her students could benefit from even a trickle of positive vibes.
RELATED: Basketball Team Has Only 1 Cheerleader So Opposing Squad Learns Her Routine and Joins Her
The teens then agreed to write and print out inspiring notes for their peers—not just the ones they were friends with, but a note for every student in the school.
As a result, the youngsters wrote 5,100 individual notes of inspiration and taped them to the school lockers on Wednesday.
The notes said things like “you are loved” and “be the type of person you want to meet”.
CHECK OUT: Heartfelt Letter From 5-Year-old Causes Restaurant Chain to Swap Plastic Straws for Paper
The students themselves were so moved by the kind gesture, that many of the notes are still taped to the lockers today.
“I just said, ‘you know when you go to sleep tonight I hope that you know that you made a positive impact on someone’s day,’” Wolff told WXIN.
(WATCH the video below)
Click To Share The Kind Story With Your Friends (Photo by Carmel Clay High Schools)
Bread lovers, rejoice! There may soon be an efficient treatment for your celiac’s disease that will allow you to indulge your love of pasta once more.
Celiac disease is an autoimmune disorder that affects by some estimates nearly 1 in 100 people. Celiac disease symptoms are triggered by gluten, a protein found in wheat and related plants, but gluten doesn’t act alone to cause the digestive symptoms that patients suffer. Rather, gluten induces an overactive immune response when it’s modified by the enzyme transglutaminase 2, or TG2, in the small intestine. New research published in the Feb. 23 issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry identifies an enzyme that turns off TG2, potentially paving the way for new treatments for celiac disease.
“Currently, therapies to treat people with celiac disease are lacking. The best approach right now is just a strict adherence to a lifelong gluten-free diet,” said Michael Yi, a chemical engineering graduate student at Stanford University who led the new study. “Perhaps the reason behind this is our relatively poor understanding of TG2.”
The biochemistry of how TG2 interacts with gluten and induces an immune response has been well studied, but more basic mysteries remain, for example how TG2 behaves in people without celiac disease. Chaitan Khosla, the professor at Stanford and director of Stanford Chemistry, has conducted several studies showing that TG2 can be active or inactive, depending on the forming or breaking of a specific chemical bond, called a disulfide bond, between two amino acids in the enzyme.
CHECK OUT: New Eyedrops Could Repair Corneas, Make Glasses Unnecessary
Khosla said: “When it became clear that even though the protein was abundant, its activity was nonexistent in a healthy organ, the question became ‘What turns the protein on, and then what turns the protein off?’”
In 2011, Khosla’s team identified the enzyme that activates TG2 by breaking its disulfide bond. In the new paper, the researchers performed experiments in cell cultures and found an enzyme that re-forms this bond, inactivating TG2. This enzyme, ERp57, is mainly known for helping fold proteins inside the cell. When it turns off TG2, it does so outside of cells, raising more questions about its functions in healthy people.
“Nobody really understands how (Erp57) gets outside the cell,” Khosla said. “The general thinking is that it’s exported from the cell in small quantities; this particular observation suggests that it actually does have a biological role outside the cell.”
MORE: Alzheimer’s Disease is Completely Reversed by Removing Just One Enzyme, Says New Study
TG2 is now also the first protein known to have a reversible disulfide bond on/off switch of this type. “This is a very different kind of on-and-off chemistry than the kind that medicinal chemists would (typically) use,” Khosla said.
Understanding this mechanism has led the team to investigate whether there are any FDA-approved drugs that could target the switch directly. Because previous studies have suggested that lack of TG2 doesn’t seem to negatively affect the health of mice, blocking TG2 is a promising avenue for treating celiac disease patients without requiring lifelong changes to their diets.
(Source: ASBMB)
Click To Share The Tasty News With Your Friends
Quote of the Day: “A really great man is known by three signs: generosity in the design, humanity in the execution, moderation in success.” – Otto von Bismarck
Photo: The Rookery Building – Matt Shiffler Photography, CC
With a new inspirational quote every day, atop the perfect photo—collected and archived on our Quotes page—why not bookmark GNN.org for a daily uplift?
An inspiring mom was determined to MAKE IT WORK, even when a powerful businessman told her she was “a stupid woman” and expected her to simply give up. Hear The Good News Guru tell the riveting story.
Read more and see the story on GNN…
The Host: Tony Robbins is a best-selling author, motivational speaker, life coach, philanthropist, and entrepreneur. The California-based strategist has become such an influential lecturer, over 4 million people have attended his live seminars. In addition to founding several different companies (and his own foundation), Robbins has worked with charities such as Feeding America, Spring Health, and Operation Underground Railroad.
Podcast: The Tony Robbins podcast is available for free on Spotify and iTunes. You can also find more of his longer motivational programs on his website.
Books: Robbins is the author of “Awaken the Giant Within,” “Unshakeable: Your Financial Freedom Playbook”, “Money: Master the Game”, and “Unlimited Power: The New Science of Personal Achievement”.
(LISTEN to the podcast below — actual interview begins at 2:27)
Good Advice? SHARE It – And, CHECK Out More on our Good Talks Page…
This groundbreaking new facility in Germany is the future of alternative energy.
Researchers have successfully tested CONTISOL,: a solar reactor that is able to run on air and make solar fuel during the day and night.
Solar fuels, such as hydrogen, are fuels that are created without the climate-damaging carbon emissions that it takes to make hydrogen from natural gas today. This means that perfecting solar reactors is the key to a 100% clean energy future.
Instead of burning a fossil fuel for the heat needed to drive the thermal chemistry process of things like splitting H2 (hydrogen) from H2O, scientists have been testing various kinds of reactors that are heated by the thermal form of solar using mirrors to concentrate solar flux on a receiver.
RELATED: Woman’s Ingenious Invention Generates Electricity Using Wind From Trains, Subways
To attain zero-carbon heat for thermochemical reactions – which can operate at temperatures as high as 1,500º Celsius – experts view the direct heat of concentrated solar power (CSP) as a more efficient clean energy source than electricity from PV or wind.
There will be an unlimited supply of sunlight over the centuries, and no climate consequences when thermochemistry is driven by solar energy. The only disadvantage compared to burning fossil energy, is that the sun goes down at night.
Now, a group of scientists at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) have built and tested a new solar reactor design that includes storage so it can provide round-the-clock heat like the current fossil-fired method, but without the emissions.
Their paper, “Fabrication and testing of CONTISOL: A new receiver-reactor for day and night solar thermochemistry” was published in December 2017, at Applied Thermal Engineering.
MORE: Tesla to Turn 50,000 Homes Into ‘World’s Largest Virtual Power Plant’ – At No Cost to Owners
“Solar reactors in the past have had the problem of what you do at night when you don’t have sun, or even when clouds go by,” said the paper’s lead author, Justin Lapp, formerly of DLR, and now Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Maine.
Lapp explained that when the temperature drops, the reaction could need to be halted or the flow rate of the reactants slowed, reducing the amount of products that you get out. If the reactor shuts down at night it cools off, not just wasting residual heat, but starting over from nothing next morning.
“So the main idea of CONTISOL was to build two reactors together,” he said. “One where sunlight is directly doing chemical processing. The other side for storing energy. In the chemical channels the high temperatures of the material drive the chemical reaction and you get a change from reactants to products within those channels, and in the air channels cooler air goes in the front and hotter air comes out the back.”
By combining storage capabilities with a direct solar thermochemical reactor, they get the best of both worlds, stable temperatures round the clock but also the most efficient heat source to perform reactions because it’s direct, so “you don’t have as many losses with multiple steps between the sunlight and the chemistry that’s happening.”
CHECK OUT: Transparent Cells Can Turn Any Glass Surface into Solar Panel, Even Car Windows
CONTISOL, which was tested in Cologne, Germany used air as the heat transfer medium because transferring the heat in air opens options for high efficiency storage systems like thermochemical storage or latent heat storage in copper or copper alloys which melt between 900 – 1100 C.
The advantages of air are that it is accessible, freely available and abundant. Air is not corrosive, and any leaks would be inconsequential, so it doesn’t need to be contained in a closed loop, he explained.
“It can pull air in just out of the atmosphere and then runs it through the heat exchanger to store the heat. And then it can vent that air out once it is cool.”
With other heat transfer materials, “you have to ensure the system is sealed everywhere and if you lose some you must buy more to make it up. With air you don’t have that problem.”
LOOK: Tesla’s Solar Roof May Actually Be Cheaper Than Your Own Roof
Unlike many heat transfer media, which can change their molecular structure at high temperatures, air remains stable at high temperatures.
However, an air receiver would seem to rule out chemical reactions using liquids like water. Not so, said Lapp.
“There are very few liquids that stay liquid in the 600 to 800 degree range that we are interested in,” he explained. “Most of the chemical reactions we deal with are either with gases like methane or with solid materials like metal oxide reactions.
Even splitting water is done at so high a temperature that water is not liquid, but steam.
“Water coming in already as steam makes it a lot easier to design the receiver. You don’t have the problems of steam expansion while its boiling. Its easier to keep it tight for steam than liquid,” he said. So to ready water for splitting, it would first be boiled to steam right in the tower.
(Source: SolarPACES)
Power Up With Positivity: Click To Share With Your Friends
