Neat News - Neat things do happen

From 31 March 2017 ivory trade will be phased out in China. By the end of 2017 it will be illegal. This is an important step in the protection of elephants in Africa against poaching, since China is the world's primary legal ivory market.

There is an effort to connect different forests by bridges or tunnels in the South of Brandenburg, a state of Germany. This is to allow animals to move without major obstacles from Poland on to Saxony-Anhalt and to West-Germany. Without the measures animals still migrate but are often killed in the traffic.

US president Barack Obama has designated two areas in Nevada and Utah to new National Monuments, the Bears Ears National Monument (5300 km²) and the Gold Butte National Monument (1200 km²). This way the land that is rich in Native American artefacts is protected from development.

New research suggests that humans survived in the Tibetan Tableau through periods of extreme cold, possibly as far back as the ice age 62000 years ago. Evidence is based on archaeological finds and on genetic data.

In areas where there is no general electricity supply such as sub-Saharan Africa families spend 20-30% of their income on kerosene to produce light. More than a billion people are concerned. The kerosene does not only produce light, but also unhealthy smoke which is inhaled by the family. The development of GravityLight allows to produce light in a cheap and clean way by pulling up a weight of 10kg which produces light for around 20 minutes.

Christmas is a time when many people feel grateful. However, as a general stance it is healthy to be grateful - not only during the Christmas period. It can help to lower blood pressure and to improve - inter alia - the condition of heart patients.

2016 was in many ways a bad year for conservation. However, there are a number of positive stories. For instance, the pandas could be taken off the list of endangered species, trafficking and trade were made more difficult, foxes recovered in the USA, and Hawaiian crows returned to a park on Hawaii.

Some developments and conditions concerning our world such as extreme poverty and hunger are depressing. However, taking a long term view, poverty, literacy, health, child mortality, freedom, fertility, and education have much improved over the last 200 years.

A vaccine against Ebola has proved to be successful and it is expected that in 2018 it will be approved and generally available. 300,000 doses are available in case there is another outbrake of Ebola.

Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is an auto-immune illness in which the immune system attacks nerve cells in the brain by destroying some protective coating of the nerve cells. This results in problems of sending signals using these cells. A new drug has been developed that attacks the part of the immune system that is responsible for the damage to the nerve cells. Test results suggest that the new drug, Ocrelizumab, offers an effective treatment against MS.

Outgoing US president Barak Obama banned new oil drillings in large parts of the arctic waters of the USA. This is assumed to be difficult to reverse by the incoming US administration. Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made a similar declaration for Canada.

In a very promising trial deep sea bacteria which produce targeted poison under laser light are used to fight early stage prostate cancer with a very high success rate. If effective - in the tests around half the patients went into remission - no removal of the prostate is necessary.

Based on evidence found on pots excavated in the Libyan Sahara it is now assumed that prehistoric people used pots to cook grains. The invention of pottery enabled the cooking of plants and this way make the food much better digestible.

Fig trees are particularly resilient and often the first plants to return to places that were struck by natural disaster. For instance, after the eruption of the Krakatoa volcano they were the only trees remain standing at an island 50 km away. On Krakatoa itself all life was gone, but fig trees were the first to return also paving the way for other living things.

Since February 2016, an app, called MyShake, has been available for detecting earthquakes by using the phones' on-board accelerometers. The app filters out the standard movements and can recognize earthquakes. If it detects a quake it reports it to a central server, combining the information from many mobile phones and gives advice on what to do.

Genetic changes in genes may allow to slow, stop, or even reverse the ageing process of cells as shown in a new study using experiments with mouse and human cells.

In a water reservoire at a depth of 3000 metres below a mine in Canada, water has been found that has been isolated for 2 billion years. Traces of sulphates allow some conclusions on early life forms and may lead to an understanding where to look for life on other planets.

In the south-west of Iceland a hole has been drilled to a depth of more than 4200 meters in the heart of a volcano. The plan is to come to a depth of 5000 metres where the temperature of the rock is expected to be between 400 and 500^oC. This can be used for energy generation by hot steam. It will then be the world's hottest borehole.

For human happiness, the physical and mental health and having a partner are more important than wealth. We may have thought so but now we have the evidence from a study involving 200,000 people.

A 5MW cryogenic power plant will be built near Manchester, UK, that can store power from renewables at a time of low need by cooling air to the point that it becomes liquid. Electricity can then be produced by the expansion of the air when it warms up again.

One problem that Germany faces in its efforts to move away from nuclear and fossil energy is to control current fluctuations. Six batteries with a capacity of 15 MW each will be installed for a total of 100 Million euros to support the control of current fluctuations and stablize the grid.

A man who suffered from a bad tremor in his right hand needed a brain operation to remove the cause of the tremor in his brain. Instead of the traditional way of doing this by opening the skull, a team of doctors used a techniques to focus strong ultrasound waves to destroy the tissue in the brain that caused the faulty electric signals. This meant to remove the tremor without any invasive treatment.

Off Rhode Island the first commercial wind farm in the USA is about to produce energy. Other projects are in the pipeline so that at least some start in this renewable direction is done before the new administration has a chance to change direction.

In a study it has been found that in 9% of patients with psychosis, antibodies can be found that attack parts of the brain. This opens the way for a new treatment in this group of patients by giving them drugs that suppress their immune system with a potentially dramatic improvement in their health situation.

Stroboscopic light helps against Alzheimer's disease in mice. It seems to stimulate certain cells to get active against harmful proteins such as the beta amyloid proteins. It has now to be tested whether the results transfer to humans.

In a new study it has been found out that adolescents may be motivated to eat more healthily if they get the impression that this way they rebel against companies that promote unhealthy eating. This approach seems to me more successful than a traditional approach of trying to convince them by good arguments to eat more healthily.

For the fifth consecutive year, the arms production by the top 100 arms producing companies has fallen in 2015, albeit by only 0.6 percent according to information by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (sipri).

After a pharmaceutical company increased the price of Daraprim, a drug against malaria, by more than 5000 percent, Australian school students from Sydney Grammar School produced the drug for about 2 dollars - compared to 750 dollars from the company - per dose.

For the first time in seven years there is a big test for a new vaccine against HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The test will be carried through in South Africa and aims to involve more than 5000 sexually active persons. With about seven million infected people, South Africa is one of the most affected countries. Up to now there is no vaccination nor a cure available, although significant improvements of the life expectancy of infected persons are achieved by anti-retroviral medication.

In animal experiments, microbes in the gut have been detected which may have a bad effect on the brain with respect to Parkinson's Disease or even cause it. This may lead to a treatment option for the currently incurable disease.

A year ago Wales adopted a new organ donor law which makes consent to organ donation the default, that is, unless a person explicitly declares that they are not happy with organ donation it is assumed that they are. It is expected that in the longer run there will be 25% more organ donations from deceased people.