POSITIVE NEWS plus a dash of the freshest visual arts and literature...
Your Editor "My mission is to hand-pick the best good-news stories."
Action for Happiness launches. This is a new global campaign that aims to… “to inspire a mass movement for fundamental cultural change” based on evidence-based approaches to what works in terms of generating a happy citizenry, without damaging the economy by simply “spending for happiness”.
Google has put a billion computing cores at the disposal of the academic community. The Google Exacycle program aims to stimulate science and engineering research by allowing researchers to run huge simulations, with the aim of boosting innovative R&D breakthroughs. The level of computing power on offer from Google is off the scale, even compared [...]
Book reading is good for you at age 16. New research shows reading to be the only teenage-years indicator for getting a professional job in later life. The reputable University of Oxford research announced today is examining the lives of 17,000 British people all born in May 1970, tracking their progress across time. They found [...]
The British Library has launched a fine new website dedicated to children’s games and rhymes in the 20th century. Click on Browse Games and then “Hear From The Researchers” to view six video interviews with researchers working on the topic. Further reading: Wikipedia — Children’s Street Culture
Not content with planning trips into Earth orbit, British businessman Richard Branson has announced Virgin Oceanic in partnership with Google. The new Virgin/Google two-year project will work with U.S. explorer Chris Welsh, and designer of undersea vehicles Graham Hawkes, to explore “the last frontiers of our own Blue Planet: the very bottom of our seas”. [...]
The creation of the world’s biggest ever telescope is underway. The control headquarters for the £1.2bn technology project has been chosen and funded. The Square Kilometre Array HQ will be at the Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire, UK. The core telescope arrays are likely to be sited in Australia or South Africa. The result will [...]
Israel has discovered about 200 years worth of natural gas entirely within its own offshore waters. Under investigation since 2009, the massive 125 square mile Leviathon field is now yielding even larger discoveries. There may even be oil beneath the gas. A smaller field in scheduled to start producing energy in 2013, with Leviathon set [...]
The Acoustic Society reports briefly on a valuable project near San Francisco, restoring the natural soundscape of woodlands. While it’s important to restore the ecological and economic integrity of such places, in order to pass them the later generations, we don’t often consider the aural aspect of such places. The full article they refer to [...]
Skype is already free — and now the phone-over-the-web firm has a new free service called Skype in the Classroom. This provides a suite of services just for educators, and the new offering already has over 7,000 users signed up to it. Kids around the world are communicating with and learning from each other, even [...]
The latest talk at the Long Now Foundation is Matt Ridley’s Deep Optimism (MP3 link) Matt was an editor with The Economist magazine for eight years, and is the author of the book The Rational Optimist. He is curious about why… “The criers of havoc keep being proved wrong.” and argues that… “fundamental optimism about [...]
 Romantically Challenged (USA) (UK) |
 The Naked Gardener (USA) (UK) |
 Amazing sequel to H.G. Wells's famous novella! On Amazon US. |
 The Lost Secret of the Green Man (USA) (UK) |
 Deedee Divine's Totally Skewed Guide to Life (USA) (UK) |
