March 26, 2020
The Optimist Daily Update with Summers & Kristy - A weekday read of our top news stories featuring solutions and people creating solutions to make the world a better place. Subscribe to The Optimist Daily Update for a positive Read More...
Babbel makes its language-learning app free for all US students
As students find themselves cooped up in their homes due to the outbreak, an increasing number of educational services are taking down their paywalls to encourage learners to, well, learn more. Earlier this week, for example, Yale made its beloved online “happiness” class free for everyone. Read More...
Deepak Chopra: Why we need a well-being state, not a welfare state
This week, Deepak Chopra published a sharp, insightful column about coronavirus in SF Gate. We’re not going to publish the whole piece right here, but we want to share a snippet here because it provides a fantastic perspective on how we can take the lessons from COVID 19 to build a state that Read More...
Open source education is gaining over costly textbook companies
Paired with the rising cost of college tuition, the astronomical growth of textbook prices makes many students' dreams of attending a university fall well short of a reality. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that from 1977 to 2015 the cost of textbooks rose over three times the rate Read More...
Celebrate Fantastic Fungi Day with a home movie screening and director’s Q&A
Today is Fantastic Fungi Day! These impressive organisms work to recycle and decompose material in our ecosystems to make room for new growth. They connect to one another through extensive networks and some even provide amazing health and nutrition benefits to humans. At a time when humanity Read More...
Global wind energy capacity hits all time high; it grew by a fifth last year
The past year was a good one for renewables as the world’s wind power capacity grew by almost a fifth in 2019, boosted by a boom of wind farms in China and the US. The Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) found that wind power capacity grew by 60.4 gigawatts, or 19 percent, compared with 2018, in Read More...
The UK’s parliament pension fund is dumping fossil fuel investments
Good news from the clean energy front in the UK: The Parliament’s pension fund, which takes care of the pensions for members of parliament (MP), has made record investments in renewable energy and cut its exposure to fossil fuel companies. A new report from the £700m pension fund showed that Read More...
NASA’s “Perseverance” rover will still launch on time this summer
The new Mars rover, scheduled to launch in July, is most appropriately named “Perseverance.” Despite budget complications and the global COVID-19 pandemic, NASA is confident that the six-wheeled rover will still take off this summer. According to division director Lori Glaze, the rover is Read More...
March 25, 2020
The Optimist Daily Update with Summers & Kristy - A weekday read of our top news stories featuring solutions and people creating solutions to make the world a better place. Subscribe to The Optimist Daily Update for a positive Read More...
March 25, 2020
The Optimist Daily Update with Summers & Kristy - A weekday read of our top news stories featuring solutions and people creating solutions to make the world a better place. Subscribe to The Optimist Daily Update for a positive Read More...