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New law shields California college students who seek help after overdosing
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY'S EDITORIAL TEAM When TJ McGee overdosed in his UC Berkeley dorm room two years ago, his roommates hesitated before calling for help. He lay on the floor, pale and seizing, while they weighed the risk: call for help and potentially face university consequences, or wait and Read More...
What nobody mentions in the return-to-office debate: babies
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Governments have spent decades and billions trying to reverse falling birth rates. Cash bonuses for new parents in South Korea. Generous parental leave in Scandinavia. Subsidized childcare across the EU. And yet fertility rates in most high-income countries Read More...
What governments and households are being asked to do in the oil crisis
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM The International Energy Agency has already done something it has never done before: ordered the largest release of government oil reserves in its history. Now it is turning to the demand side... and asking a lot of people to make some small changes Read More...
More movement, more energy burned: new study challenges metabolism myth
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM The idea that your body works against you when you exercise has circulated in fitness and science communities for years. Work out more, the theory goes, and your metabolism quietly dials back somewhere else (suppressing immune function, trimming reproductive Read More...
Urban coyotes are denning next door: here's what to know
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Somewhere near you, a coyote may be nursing a litter of pups right now. She chose her den carefully: tucked under a fallen tree trunk, wedged inside an old burrow, or backed into a pile of abandoned concrete. One priority guided the choice: keeping you from Read More...
How robots and drones are cleaning the ocean floor across Europe
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Most ocean cleanup efforts work on the same assumption: the problem floats. Skim the surface, collect the plastic, done. The trouble is that most marine litter doesn't float. It sinks to the seabed, where it sits undisturbed and largely out of reach of the Read More...
A single dose of psilocybin gave smokers six times better odds of quitting than the patch
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM A new clinical trial from Johns Hopkins University produced results that surprised even the researchers behind it. Participants who took a single dose of psilocybin, the active compound in magic mushrooms, had more than six times greater odds of being Read More...
The DNA database built to protect lions just helped convict the people who killed one
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM When conservation biologists fitted a male lion with a radio collar near Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe, they were studying his movements. They drew blood, logged his health information, and stored his DNA profile in a database. They had no way of knowing Read More...
China’s Great Green Wall turns Taklamakan desert into a growing carbon sink
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM For decades, the Taklamakan Desert was described in stark terms: a “biological void,” a vast expanse of shifting sand where little could survive. Slightly larger than the state of Montana and ringed by mountains that block most incoming moisture, it Read More...
First baby born after womb transplant from deceased donor offers new hope
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM For years, the idea sounded almost impossible: transplant a womb, establish a pregnancy, and welcome a healthy child into the world. In the United Kingdom, that vision has now become reality in a way that expands the possibilities for women who once had very Read More...