Science
From mathematics and AI to medicine and psychology, The Optimist Daily features the latest news on discoveries, technological advances, and breakthroughs in the world of science. Our Science section is here to engage and enlighten you.
The Great Bubble Barrier: bubble curtains are intercepting 86 percent of river plastic
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Rivers are how plastic gets to the ocean. Stop it there, and you stop it for good. The Great Bubble Barrier, a Dutch company, built a technology to do exactly that. A perforated tube runs across the bed of a waterway and connects to an air pump. The pump Read More...
The biodegradable, self-cleaning fabric made from living caterpillar fungus
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM The sustainable fashion industry has spent years trying to reduce harm: less water, fewer synthetic chemicals, more recycled material. A research team at the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology went in a different direction. They grew the fabric from a Read More...
What India’s hydrogen train launch means for its vast railway network
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM India launched its first hydrogen-powered train earlier this month. It was built domestically and is now operating in Haryana. Two hydrogen-powered driving cars, eight passenger coaches, a capacity of about 2,600 passengers, and a top speed of 47 mph (75 Read More...
The Newcastle researcher turning ocean plastic into a dolphin rescue strategy
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Gillnets catch dolphins by accident. The nylon mesh hangs nearly invisible in the water, and dolphins’ echolocation, the system they rely on to navigate and hunt, can fail to detect it. The filaments may produce no detectable echo, or the dolphins may Read More...
Data centers explained: the hidden infrastructure behind your daily digital life
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Every time you stream something, pay a bill, or ask an AI a question, a server somewhere is putting in the work. Those servers live in data centers: large, unglamorous buildings full of humming machines that run around the clock and consume staggering amounts Read More...
The physics of what happens when you suppress a sneeze
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Holding in a sneeze carries more risk than most people assume. The injuries it can cause include ruptured eardrums, damage to the tissue lining the throat, and in rarer cases, air trapped under the skin of the neck or leaking into the space between the lungs. Read More...
From molten salt to liquid air: clean energy’s weird storage revolution
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM There’s something strange about where the clean energy transition has gotten stuck. Generating power from the sun and wind? Mostly figured out. Storing it? That’s the part nobody has fully solved. When the sun sets and the wind drops, whatever energy Read More...
Scientists trial a painless brush test for oral cancer that returns results in 60 minutes
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM A brush swab of the mouth. Four genes. Results in under an hour. Researchers from Queen Mary University of London, working with partners in India, have shown that this simple approach can match the diagnostic accuracy of a surgical biopsy, without a scalpel Read More...
5 habits that build lasting happiness, according to research
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Most people treat happiness as something that arrives when conditions are right. The last decade of psychological science tells a different story. Happiness isn’t mainly a mood or a simple feeling. It’s an output of how your life is structured, the Read More...
In Cuba’s fuel crisis, solar tricycles took the streets
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Cuba has long been known for its vintage cars — the American ones that kept rolling through decades of embargo and scarcity, repaired with ingenuity and improvised parts. That ingenuity hasn’t gone anywhere. What it’s being directed at now is something Read More...