All the Positives From April You Need to Know About
Amidst the poignant Coronavirus crisis in India, anti-Jewish and anti-Palestinian atrocities in Israel, distressing police brutality and Afro-American killings in the US, and a short but intense European Super League debacle that touched issues far beyond football, Your Weekly Positives are here to shine a bright light on all the positive outtakes from the past month.
Promising Covid-19 News and Other Medical Developments
Let’s start with some Coronavirus advancements, shall we? Vaccine updates, new drugs on the market, many clinical trials underway… April had it all.
Over the course of the past few months, we’ve been hearing all about the successful Pfizer, the problematic AstraZeneca and the revolutionary Jansen, yet no one really talked about Moderna. What seemed to be a shy grey mouse of a vaccine, however, ended up positively surprising many and showing more than 90% efficacy in protecting against the virus even six months after the jab. Speaking of vaccines, at the end of the month the EU officially announced it will welcome vaccinated American tourists this summer.
April has also been a month of new Covid-19 drug developments and discoveries — like the “antibody cocktail” developed by a multinational pharmaceutical company Regeneron. Although still in clinical trials, the drug has already shown strong protection against the virus in those living with someone previously and presently infected. Pfizer’s CEO Albert Bourla announced the company is expecting approval on their newest experimental Covid-19 pill, which is supposed to combat the virus at first sight — Bourla himself is striving to make it widely available by the end of the year. In the UK, the Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared a possibility for people with mild Coronavirus cases to treat it with take-home antiviral pills currently being developed by a UK-based company. Researchers in Japan allegedly came up with a revolutionary Covid-19 test able to detect more than 100 variants in one go. And the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has been using machine-learning algorithms to detect and predict different Covid-19 variants through analysing nothing other than our natural human language.
In other health news, researchers from the Jenner Institute at Oxford University (the ones from the AstraZeneca vaccine) developed the most effective malaria vaccine so far, with 77% efficacy shown in 12-month-long trials in Burkina Faso. On the other side of the globe, the US proposed a bill to lower the cost of prescriptive drugs and provide health care reliefs for millions of Americans. The US Food and Drug Administration has also pledged to easily provide abortion pills to those in need and send them by mail until the end of the pandemic.
Societal Progress and Delivered Justice
Let’s start in the US, as last month has seen a few hopeful advancements for the American society. One of the biggest pieces of April news was the George Floyd trial, emitted live on various social media platforms and followed by people from all over the world, which ended with a second-degree murder conviction for the former US police officer Derek Chauvin. Following various distressing anti-Asian hateful incidents from earlier this year, the US Senate advanced a bill aiming to combat such anti-Asian violence through reviewing reported hate crimes and provide guidance for both law enforcement bodies and the public. The Senate also voted for the H.R.40 bill to study the legacy of domestic slavery and propose following system repair and repartitions. In Europe, France toughened its age of consent to 15 years old, automatically defining sex with those younger as rape. Previously, to reach a rape conviction prosecutors in France were required to prove the lack of consent.
International Climate Pledges
On April 22nd, the last day of the Earth Day global climate summit, the Biden Administration pledged to halve new domestic carbon emissions to go below 2005 levels before 2030 — a solutions which is supposed to bring the global economy closer to reaching net zero by 2050. Last month the US has also agreed to cooperate with China, the second biggest world polluter, to urgently address the climate crisis and work on initiatives further cutting their carbon emissions. What’s more, the Senate voted to bring back the Obama methane rule previously dropped during the Trump ruling. The bill significantly limits methane leaks from oil and gas sites and imposes strict control measures on companies using such methods.
One of the ground breaking April climate declarations was New Zealand’s introduction of world’s first climate change law requiring businesses to report their climate change impact. Being world’s first law as such, the kiwi government hopes it would bring the country closer to its net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 goal. In Europe, after the positively surprising discovery that the first French lockdown improved air quality and avoided thousands of Covid-related deaths, the country’s government announced a plan to ban all domestic flights if the destination can be reached in less than 2,5 hours by train. And as a part of the EU’s initiative to lower the organisation’s carbon emissions and become climate-neutral two pioneering automobile companies — the Swedish Volvo Group and German Daimler Truck AG (Mercedes-Benz manufacturer) — have joined forces and are planning to produce hydrogen fuel cells for trucks from 2025. Such technology is considered one of the best zero-emission locomotive solutions, as the only biproducts hydrogen produces are heat and water.
Ground-breaking Science and Extraordinary Discoveries
Science has provided us with some great discoveries and inspiring firsts last April! Ingenuity, NASA’s small Mars helicopter, completed its first flight on the planet, making it the first machine created on Earth to have flown beyond it. Speaking of space, the newest discovery of an ancient planet inside the Earth might explain our planet’s growing weak magnetic spot named the South Atlantic Anomaly. According to research done so far, an ancient planet once called Theia had hit Earth 4.5 billion years ago causing its chunks bigger than Mount Everest to sink into the mantle.
Coming back to Earth itself, researchers from Purdue University in Indiana created the whitest paint on the planet that reflects up to 98.1% of light, making it a game-changer for building design and cooling protection against global warming. April was also the month when the first fully 3D-printed house was legally inhabited in Europe — and the Dutch couple who has just moved in says the two-bedroom bungalow feels very safe and comfortable. Microbiologists from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University discovered how to trap and remove microplastics from water using bacteria biofilm. And the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has found a way to translate spiderweb vibrations into music tones and potentially use it as a way to communicate with spiders.
There have been some good news for the animal habitat as well, as zoos all around the world have been reporting “baby booms” over the course of the pandemic due to a calmer and quieter environment without tourist floods.