2017 | The Optimist Daily: Making Solutions the News

India can get self-driving cars—despite its drivers, jaywalkers and cows

As global giants like Tesla, Uber, and Google take self-driving cars to the streets, Indian companies are still at the experimental stage. Earlier this year, local carmaker Tata Motors sought permission to test its driverless vehicle on Bengaluru’s Read More...

Urban wildlife plays a key role in keeping us humans healthy

Sharing our city blocks with trees, birds, and other animals is a good thing. As strange as it sounds, urban wildlife helps control the spread of diseases typically passed from animals to humans. Unfortunately, as the world continues to urbanize, more and more of the natural spaces found within Read More...

London’s iconic red buses to run on biofuel made from waste coffee grounds

Coffee powers more than just people, it’s also starting to power public transportation in London. Using a technique that extracts oil from waste coffee grounds, a technology firm has been able to create a biofuel that will be used to help power some of London’s famous busses starting this week. Read More...

Hydrogen cars could finally take off thanks to this new method of producing H2

Part of the reason that hydrogen cars haven’t made much of an impact yet is that producing hydrogen fuel is an expensive and energy-intensive process. Now, Researchers from Spain and Norway have come up with a new method to convert methane to hydrogen with almost no loss of energy, making Read More...

The more trees a neighborhood has, the less asthma attacks its people will have

In a recent study, researchers have found that people living in polluted urban areas are far less likely to have an emergency asthma attack when there are lots of trees in their neighborhood. What this reveals is that the expansion of tree cover in very polluted urban neighborhoods can work to Read More...

Here are the solutions to the blood pressure problems created by new guidelines

This week, new guidelines established by various health organizations labeled 63 percent of 45 to 75 year olds as hypertensive. According to these new guidelines, eight million more people will be instructed to start medication and 14 million will have to increase their current regimen. But there Read More...