Neat News - Neat things do happen

On the german island of Helgoland, the grey seals were almost extinct until the early 1960s. Now the numbers have recovered and in the last season more than 300 new grey seals have been counted.

The coastal region of Valencia in Spain has devoted a signficant amount of money to support the growth of organic farming. This will benefit also the bee population in the region.

Cooking vegetables increases the levels of some antioxidants but reduces the levels of others. Detailed research is described in the Scientific American.

Greenpeace announces that the planned hunt for fin whales in Iceland has been cancelled for 2016. A great success for Greenpeace and all others who opposed to the hunt.

Gorillas are musical, they sing and hum when they have meals. This gives clues to the origins of human language.

A big problem for relying on wind power is storing the energy when there is surplus wind for times when it is calm. There is a neat idea to build big concrete balls of something like 30 metres in diameter which can be emptied from water in times of surplus energy and flooded through a turbine to produce electricity during a four hour period of still air.

A gorilla baby was delivered by Cesarean section at Bristol Zoo, England, after doctors feared for the live of mother and baby. Mother and baby are recovering and carers are cautiously optimistic.

Satellite technology is used in the fight against illegal fishing. It can help to survey huge areas in the worlds's marine reserves.

At the excarbation site in Cambridgeshire archeologists have found a wheel supposed to be 3000 years old.

Auguste Comte said in 1842 that "we can never know anything of their [planets'] chemical or mineralogical structure". Now scientists have analyzed the light going through the atmosphere of a distant planet to determine its composition.

A pair of bottlenose dolphins seem to have settled near the Northern German city of Flensburg. Traditionally there are no bottlenose dolphins in the Baltic Sea.

Although it is sad that everything has a price tag, vultures in India may benefit from their value. They tidy up animal remains and if they did not then it would have to be done by industrial carcass disposal, which makes a vulture worth around 10000 US$.

There is a new approach to the treatment of leukaemia which has been a lifeline to some patients for whom other treatment routes were exhausted. It works by reprogramming so-called T-cells to attack the cancer cells.

3D printing has been used to attempt printing living parts of a body. The major problem is that there is a diffusion limit of 0.1 to 0.2 mm for nutrients for cell survival. The experiments use microchannels to facilitate this diffusion.

After 400 years the beavers are back in some parts of southern England and contribute in the fight against flooding.

A number of drugs have been developed which may help to protect the brain against Alzheimer's disease. More research is needed to understand the mechanisms involved

The Colombian Government and Constitutional Court have banned coal mining in the Páramos, a fragile ecosystem in the Andes, after campaigning by local people and Greenpeace Colombia.

Around a 100 years after Albert Einstein published the general theory of relativity, a team of scientists has detected predicted gravitational waves generated a billion years ago by the merger of two black holes.

Former US president Jimmy Carter set up a plan 30 years back to wipe out the disease of the guinea worm, a painful disease contracted from unclean water. In recent news, the according efforts are showing a big drop in new cases, giving hope that the disease can be completely eradicated in a few years' time.

In Japan work has started on a floating solar farm which is to be finished in 2018 and will provide electricity to 5000 homes. It is the biggest floating solar farm up to date.

China has installed a capacity of wind energy generation of 21GW in 2014. In 2015 the newly installed capacity is up to almost 29GW, which makes almost half (46 percent) of the newly installed wind turbines world wide. By 2020 China wants to produce 15 percent of its electricity by renewables, not least in order to improve the air quality.

2 February was World Wetlands Day. Its motto was "Wetlands for our future, sustainable livelihoods". Greenpeace published a series of beautiful pictures of wetlands for the occasion.

At the excarbation site in Cambridgeshire archeologists have found a tiny wooden box with content, a pot and animal bones.

In a study it has been found that reforestation with rainforests leads to significant absorption of carbon. In 2014, the UN climate conference in New York decided (in a non-binding agreement) to end deforestation by 2030.

By 2018 the world largest solar complex in Morocco is to provide electricity to more than 1 million people. The first phase of the plant is switched on now. The electricity is generated from heated oil, which is also used to melt salt to a temperature of 500C. This heat in turn is used to generate electricity for hours after sunset.

Off the coast of Yorkshire the up to now biggest offshore windfarm is to be built. It will generate electricity for more than a million homes in the UK.

The Born Free Foundation says that it had found evidence that there are lions in a remote park in north-western Ethiopia where supposedly the lions became extinct in the 20th century.

There has been an agreement to protect a huge area of the forest in British Columbia from logging. The deal can serve as a model for other areas.

Babylonian geometry was more advanced than thought. In a new discovery it has been found out that at Babylonian age at least one person made already calculations on the movement of Jupiter that were very advanced and rediscovered only in the 14th century.