💡 Hopescrolling: 31 optimistic news in October
💉 13% decline in child deaths thanks to malaria vaccine. 💰 Americans are getting wealthier, especially the poor. 🌱 Rhubarbs key to recycling electric car batteries. 🐔 CRISPR-engineered chickens resistant to flu. 🧠 New AI enables real-time brain tumor diagnosis during surgery.
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In October, we experienced the Mad Max paradox in full force. At the same time as the terrible terrorist attack on October 7th in Israel, followed by a war, the world has made progress.
In fact, I wrote about this just a few days before the attack, in The Raw Power of Human Progress.
Mathias Sundin
During the 21st century, we have experienced events such as September 11th, the financial crisis, a pandemic, and the war in Ukraine. At the same time, over a billion people have escaped extreme poverty, child mortality has been halved, and five billion people have gained access to the internet – and much, much more.
In October, a second malaria vaccine was approved and the first one has already started reducing the number of child deaths. We have made advancements in recycling electric car batteries (using rhubarb!) Americans are getting wealthier, especially the poor. New AI enables real-time diagnosis of brain tumors during surgery. ChatGPT makes diagnoses as accurately as emergency doctors – and much more.
The negative events are often large and dramatic, but quite few. Given them, we should be living in a Mad Max world.
But we don't.
Each individual advancement is usually small, but there are many of them. Millions of small improvements every day add up to a massive tsunami of progress.
Mathias Sundin
The Angry Optimist
Hopescrolling
Hopescrolling = the opposite of doomscrolling.
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💡 Fact-based optimistic news in September
🧏 Curing deafness in children with gene therapy - trail begins
A novel gene therapy trial aims to restore quality hearing in children with auditory neuropathy. The treatment focuses on rectifying a fault in the OTOF gene, which is pivotal for sound transmission.
💉 13% decline in child deaths thanks to malaria vaccine
Malaria claims the lives of half a million children every year, but the number is dropping thanks to new vaccines.
🚁 Electric air taxis to showcase at the Olympics
Electric air taxis will be highlighted at the 2024 and 2028 Summer Olympics.
💰 Americans are getting wealthier, especially the poor
Every group got richer, and inequality decreased over the last three years.
🌱 Rhubarbs key to recycling electric car batteries
Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology have devised a new and efficient way to recycle metals from electric car batteries. The method enables the recycling of 100 percent of aluminum and 98 percent of lithium from used electric car batteries.
♿ Record high employment and education levels among disabled Americans
Significant increase in full-time employment and university graduation rates among disabled individuals over the last decade.
📲 Oxford researchers: Overblown fears about misinformation from AI
Generative AI like ChatGPT, Midjourney and DALL-E will “trigger the next misinformation nightmare." But so far, the evidence doesn't support this claim and there are good arguments as to why that won't change, writes three researchers.
🔋 Funding for Project Energy Society
Sweden's innovation agency, Vinnova, has awarded $100,000 to Lund for the CoAction project, in which Project Energy Society is included. The goal is to create a new electricity grid with energy sharing, enabling a low fixed price for electricity.
🐔 CRISPR-engineered chickens resistant to flu
In groundbreaking use of CRISPR gene-editing technology, scientists have engineered flu-resistant chickens. This is a first step towards reducing avian flu outbreaks.
🔬 Breakthrough: X-ray vision into the microscopic world
"This type of information that you can get with laser-like X-rays, you just can't get by any other means," says Matthias Kling, a professor of photon science at Stanford University.
🌌 Scientists make key discovery about antimatter
Scientists confirm antimatter's response to gravity. This is a key discovery that may unlock the reason why the universe is matter-dominated.
🚰 MIT: Desalination freshwater cheaper than tap water
Breakthrough solar-powered system unveils cheaper desalination process Potential to produce freshwater at costs lower than tap water.
🧠 New AI enables real-time brain tumor diagnosis during surgery
Scientists unveil an innovative artificial intelligence tool that swiftly diagnoses tumor types during surgery.
💉 New malaria vaccine receives WHO approval – a malaria-free future in sight?
The second such vaccine, expected to significantly bolster supply and save countless lives in Africa. A monumental step towards a malaria-free future, says WHO.
🐯 40% more snow leopards in Bhutan
A 39.5 percent increase in snow leopard population from 2016, with 134 individuals confirmed. An expanded survey covering over 9,000 square kilometers of habitat reveals promising density.
🚘 Self-driving cars are safer than human drivers, study shows
The study finds that human drivers are more likely to crash, cause crashes and injure others than autonomous vehicles. Self-driving cars can reduce traffic fatalities and improve urban mobility.
🦾 US and Sweden are among top AI beneficiaries
US, Singapore, Sweden, the UK, and Switzerland are poised to gain immensely from AI.
🚰 Desalination of salt water is getting cheaper and cheaper
Desalination is the process of removing salt from seawater or brackish water to produce fresh water. Costs have fallen dramatically in recent years, thanks to technological innovations and economies of scale.
🦾 ChatGPT diagnoses as accurately as ER doctors
ChatGPT was compared to doctors in a Dutch study. Version 4 of ChatGPT made the correct diagnosis in 97 percent of cases.
🌡️ Staying within 1.5 degrees is possible, due to record growth for renewables
Record growth of clean energy technologies boosts hope. The world is set to invest a record USD 1.8 trillion in clean energy in 2023.
🦏 Rhinos on the rise: 5% growth last year
Global rhino numbers increase to 27,000. Southern white rhino numbers rise for the first time since 2012.
🔌 Record global access to electricity
The number of people without electricity access will lower to an estimated 745 million by year-end.
If you are not a subscriber to our free, weekly newsletter with fact-based optimistic news, you really should be! 📧
Most read news in August
💪 The raw power of human progress
In the 21st century, we've experienced terrorism, natural disasters, wars, financial crises, and a global pandemic. Why are we not living in a Mad Max world?
💉 13% decline in child deaths thanks to malaria vaccine
Malaria claims the lives of half a million children every year, but the number is dropping thanks to new vaccines.
👩🏫 Towards the centaur school - part 1
I found myself sitting there again. In a teacher's room. Almost 20 years since last time. Back then as a student teacher, this time as an AI developer. Now begins a journey towards developing AI services for education.
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💡 Columns, musings, essays and Optimist's Edge
🕰️ Counting the Minutes and Seconds to a Sci-Fi Future
We should create a Genesis Clock, to counter the Doomsday Clock, and count the minutes and seconds we have until dawn, writes The Conservative Futurist, James Pethokoukis.
🌅 Climate optimism: Shake the bottle! Pop the cork!
A message from the founder of We Don't Have Time on how we make the positive climate future come sooner.
🔋 Have electric cars reached price parity with fossil fuel cars now?
"...electric cars will reach the same price level as combustion engine cars by 2024," we wrote in 2021. Too optimistic, some said. You are naive, others said. Now it's almost 2024, how naive were we?
💡 Read The Techno-Optimists Manifesto
We are becoming a serious counterforce. A counterforce against slowing down, stopping, pausing progress and instead accelerating it. A progress movement.
💡 Musings of the Angry Optimist: Dumb money
How 'dumb money' became 'smart money', what you should do to knock down a wall, and what to do if you're inside that wall.
💡 Musings of the Angry Optimist: Slowing down is more dangerous than speeding up
It certainly feels like slower progress is safer than faster, right? But when it comes to technological development, it's often the opposite.
💡 Musings of the Angry Optimist: No AI pause, but the doomsday rhetoric has taken hold
Doomsday rhetoric has taken hold at the highest level, and risks damaging the future of humanity.
💡 Musings of the Angry Optimist: "Optimius, please clear the table"
ChatGPT can now see, hear, and speak. Tesla's Optimus can see its own body and interact with its surroundings. A completely new type of robot is getting closer.
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