BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM So many of us participate in the same morning coffee ritual: the machine warming up, the pressure building, the crema settling into the cup. It’s such a fixed sequence that it’s hard to imagine any part of it changing. But against the odds, researchers at the University of New…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM High fruit intake is associated with many wonderful health benefits, like protecting our lungs from air pollution and lowering diabetes risk. But did you know it’s also linked to a seven percent lower risk of breast cancer? The compounds driving that association, according to Natalie Ledesma, M.S., RDN, an…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM The California grid has a timing problem. Solar runs from mid-morning through early evening. Demand peaks later. Batteries have bridged part of that gap for years, but only about four hours’ worth. On June 1, a project in Kern County doubled that window. Tumbleweed, a 125-megawatt battery installation, went…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM A dam fell in Iceland last December, the first the country has ever deliberately dismantled. The structure on the River Melsá had long since stopped generating power. Sheep were living in the old powerhouse. “It wasn’t providing any electricity,” said Hamish Moir, a river engineer from CBEC, the Scottish…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM The feeling of not mattering, of going through a whole day without anyone really seeing you, sits closer to the surface than most people let on. Jennifer Breheny Wallace has spent years studying this. In her new book Mattering, she frames it as a gap: the distance between how…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM The question seemed reasonable enough: what heat adaptation interventions were already working in Africa’s low-income communities? Lara Dugas, an epidemiologist, and climate scientist Mark New had received funding from the Wellcome Trust’s HeatNexus initiative to evaluate what was in place. When they went looking, they found nothing. “The initial…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM The human brain contains approximately 86 billion neurons. A honeybee brain contains roughly one million, packed into about one cubic millimeter. That brain, it turns out, can learn to tell human faces apart. The research goes back more than two decades. Across multiple studies, honeybees have been trained to…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM An impressive $14.7 million from the city. $1.3 billion in economic investment returned. $1.4 billion in energy savings. 11,000 jobs created. Those are the results of the Philadelphia Energy Campaign’s first decade, according to a 10-year economic impact report released last month. The financing model that made this possible…
Episode Description: A high-risk breast cancer diagnosis used to mean one thing: chemotherapy. A large UK trial just found that 68 percent of those patients could skip it safely, based on a genomic test that already exists and is already in use. Arielle and Karissa also get into the pigeon liver finding that stumped scientists…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM What if scraps from a dinner could become a habitat? That’s the basic premise of the Shells for Shorelines program in a meaningful sense: the shells of oysters eaten at restaurants in Orange County can become the foundation on which new oysters settle and grow in the ocean. The…
