The wildfires burning from coast to coast in Canada have Canadians worried about their livelihood, neighbours, and the planet itself. Finding good news in fires is tough, but in the context of the climate crisis knowledge about to fight fire is good news. The best way to stop wildfires is
Continue readingAuthor: Adam Clare
Things Are Good: No Mow May No Mo’?
Maybe, maybe not. It’s the end of May and hopefully you haven’t been mowing. The No Mow May campaign encourages people with lawns to let them grow during the month of May to let insects and other critters thrive. This makes sense, and if you have a lawn then you
Continue readingThings Are Good: How Quebec Will Defeat AirBnB
The global housing crisis has numerous causes, and one of them is AirBnB. Of course there are competitors to the short term rental company but the impact of their presence on the housing market has been staggering in places with high level of tourism like Montreal. Back in March people
Continue readingThings Are Good: Indoor Plants That Eliminate Carcinogenics
Plants are one of the most obvious good things that there can be, and certain plants are excellent at cleaning specific chemicals out of the air. We all know that plants clean the air, but what aspects of air they clean can change from plant to plant. Researchers tried to
Continue readingThings Are Good: An Interview with a Cat
Those frisky felines are at it again! This time one of them is dishing out advice on how to improve your working life by communicating and acting with others. Jorts the cat is a Twitter celebrity that helps students understand their rights and workers understand theirs too. The key thing
Continue readingThings Are Good: It’s Simple to Install Solar Panels
Efficient of solar panels continues to increase and the costs of installing them keep going down, meaning that there’s never been a better time than now to install solar panels. One of the great things about solar is how scalable it is, you can install a small system on a
Continue readingThings Are Good: Trichloroethylene Exposure Linked to Parkinson’s
Finding the source of Parkinson’s disease has been a challenge for many researchers and this year we’ve gotten a lot closer to figuring it out. There are multiple ways that one can get the neurodegenerative disease with no one factor being the deciding one. This year alone researchers have found
Continue readingThings Are Good: Humans Should Rank Higher Than Drivers
Hey @CityofVancouver? this is second incident I’ve seen caused by these useless ‘slow street’ barricades installed last month. They don’t slow down traffic; they cause crashes and traffic chaos. pic.twitter.com/A4xZOwMCGi — Jill Bennett (@jillreports) March 23, 2023 In North American cities the disease known as Car Brain infected urban planners
Continue readingThings Are Good: Don’t Move to Paradise, Make a Paradise Instead
A man in New Zealand thinks it’s better to create your own piece of paradise than to move to a natural one and just taking it over. Back in 1987 Hugh Wilson moved to a neglected part of the country where the natural environment was not doing well and has
Continue readingThings Are Good: Dads That Stay Home Are Less Sexist
Moms and dads both can take parental leave in the majority of countries around the world, and researchers have found in places that men take parental leave that the dads become less sexist. Turns out when dads are the primary caregiver for their children learn more about the gendered roles
Continue readingThings Are Good: Cutting Construction Carbon
Building buildings takes a lot of energy and once done the built structure continues to consume energy and have a carbon footprint. Many options exist to reduce the carbon impact of buildings from the point of construction all the way to deconstruction, but the industry still needs to adopt these
Continue readingThings Are Good: Rate Your Landlord
Landlords run a business that profits off a basic human need: shelter. As a result of the basic power imbalance between those who can own multiple homes and those who can’t even afford one the whole landlord tenet relationship is prone to exploitation. The power imbalance is furthered by landlord
Continue readingThings Are Good: New Method Destroys Forever Chemicals
Forever chemicals get their name because there’s no natural way they decompose and we don’t know of efficient ways to break them down, that’s changing though. Researchers at UBC have found a way to destroy one family of forever chemical known as per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. PFAS are found
Continue readingThings Are Good: 10 Ways Jobs can be More Sustainable
Today is the day to celebrate workers. If you’re currently employed and don’t own the company you’re at then, congratulations, you’re a worker! We can thank worker movements of the past for weekends, health care, and many other improvements to our quality of life. In the coming decades we may
Continue readingThings Are Good: Kids Who Go To Art Galleries Are More Generous
Raising kids is a challenge, raising kids that are conscientious and caring is even harder. From new research it’s clear that taking kids to enjoy art will help them care more about the world around them and make them more generous. Art helps people of all ages experience awe and
Continue readingThings Are Good: Off Grid Living for a Decade
The idea of living off the grid may sound impossible or like a pipe dream, but it is possible and cost efficient. A couple have been living off the grid for over a decade in their earth ship that looks and feels like a normal house. The neat stuff they
Continue readingThings Are Good: Three Day Weekends Rule, Good For Your Health
Unions fought hard for a five day work week and now we need to fight for a four day work week. A global study of people who get a three day weekend from their job have better health and are happier. This is quite unsurprising to anyone who has enjoyed
Continue readingThings Are Good: Coal Continues Collapse
One of the worst ways to generate electricity is to burn coal to heat water to spin turbines, the only reason this power generation exists is due to the cheap cost of coal. OF course, when coal is brunt it releases radiation and carbon into the atmosphere worsening local areas
Continue readingThings Are Good: Tokyo Demonstrates the True Cost of Cars
Japan’s well respected car industry sells cars the world over, but at home it’s a different story. Car ownership is low in Japan for obvious reasons like having a good public transit system and high speed trains for intercity travel. In the capital city of Tokyo car ownership is amongst
Continue readingThings Are Good: Machine Learning Improves Enzyme Eating Plastic
A bacteria that eats plastic may sound too good to be true since we have so much plastic waste littering the planet. The rouble with plastic eating bacterias is that they aren’t efficient nor can they survive long outside the lab. So a research team turned to machine learning, or
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