Health
Finding good health news amidst a pandemic can be quite daunting. That’s not the case with The Optimist Daily, where positive news is in high supply. Our Health section covers the latest good news from the health sector, featuring solutions ranging from mental and physical health to immunity, nutrition, and cutting edge medical research.
Mushrooms or plastic? An unlikely solution to pollution
Could poisonous plastic turn into a healthy food? A Dutch design studio has announced a prototyped incubator that grows oyster mushrooms—and other fungi—on plastic. The current design takes months to grow mushrooms and decompose plastic, but researchers believe that expediting the growth time Read More...
Researchers get closer to Alzheimer’s cure
Researchers at Stanford University have discovered what causes Alzheimer’s—potentially leading to a cure. The scientists noticed that disease sets in when a particular type of cell in the brain, called microglia, stops working. Microglia clean your brain, they keep out viruses and prevent Read More...
Laughing drives depression away
It might seem like a silly headline, but nitrous oxide—the same laughing gas used to ease pain and anxiety at the dentist—can be used to treat people with clinical depression. A new study had two groups of participants inhale gasses, one inhaled nitrous oxide, the other group inhaled a placebo. Read More...
Crowd-sourced seizure prediction breakthrough
A crowd-sourced online contest for data scientists has come up with a seizure-predicting model that accurately predicts seizures 82 percent of the time. Seizures impact about one percent of the population, and are described as electrical storms that take place in the brain. Earlier models did Read More...
Organic farming can feed the world
One of the main arguments against organic farming is the harvest numbers. It’s a widely held belief that without using chemicals to grow your food there’s no way of keeping bugs from eating at least a portion of your crop, so organic farms must have crop yields substantially lower than chemical Read More...
Salt-water greenhouses could lead to desert farming
Sweet water is scarce and the agriculture to produce our food uses most of it. So this is a really helpful innovation: A greenhouse that uses salt water—without the need for desalination. The project is a greenhouse made out of a cardboard-like material that has thousands of tiny holes in it. Read More...
A biofuel stove powered by the sun fights indoor cook-smoke
Four million people die every year from health problems that are caused by cooking with wood inside their homes. Now a Lesotho based company has invented a bio stove that cooks with clean fuel and doesn’t produce carcinogenic smoke. The stove also comes with a small solar panel with a USB port Read More...
British MP’s acknowledge air pollution and urge for action
There’s much talk about the threat of global warming for the future health of vast sections of the world population. That threat is presented as a good reason to act on climate change now. There’s an even better argument: Air pollution is killing millions of people today. A report by the Read More...
$25 contraception per woman per year cuts unwanted pregnancies by 70%
Hundreds of millions of women around the world want to avoid pregnancy every year but don’t have access to contraception. A new report released by the UN has found that just $25 per year per woman in the developing world would dramatically reduce deaths related to births, STDs, and other sexual Read More...
New UK guidelines say homebirths are safer
Along with feeling more comfortable, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), an arm of the UK’s department of health, has said that home births are safer. The group says that women who give birth at home are 5 times less likely to need a cesarean section, 4 times less likely Read More...