Men live longer and endangered animals return: 10 good news from 2023

There are many reasons to want to forget the year 2023 as quickly as possible. Wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan have caused much suffering. There are also natural disasters such as forest fires and earthquakes. Nevertheless: in many places there was something to celebrate.

Seals have actually disappeared in Belgium in recent decades. Now their numbers have recovered. According to the National Institute for Natural Sciences, this is partly because seal zones were introduced at the start of the Corona lockdown. There are currently between 100 and 200 seals living in Belgium.

In England, conservationists have helped bring back a popular animal: the beaver. The private conservationists who call themselves “beaver bombers” sometimes settle illegally in water bodies. Today there are around a million beavers in England, compared to just over a thousand about 100 years ago.

Jaguar populations in Brazil and the only Asiatic lion population in India have also recovered. The latter is so popular that a court had to order the relocation of some animals this year because the area was overcrowded.

Good news for men and everyone who loves them. According to a new study, male life expectancy has increased significantly in recent decades.

In the mid-1990s, a man in Europe lived on average seven years less than a woman. Since then, this difference has narrowed considerably. Now it is less than five and a half years.

According to the organization Freedom House, eight countries have made particularly strong progress when it comes to freedom this year. These include Colombia, Lesotho, Kenya and Slovenia. Thailand and Venezuela have also made progress, albeit at a low level.

The Houston Museum of Natural Sciences returned a wooden sarcophagus to Egypt in January. This after US authorities discovered that the relic had been looted and smuggled into the US in 2008.

To the delight of Poles, ‘Madonna and Child’ by Alessandro Turchi was discovered in an auction house in Tokyo. The painting was stolen by the Nazis during World War II. Now she is back in her rightful home. A total of eleven works of art stolen during the Second World War were returned to the Polish National Museum in Warsaw in 2023.

‘The Parish Garden in Nuenen in Spring’ by Vincent van Gogh, which was stolen from a Dutch museum in 2020, was returned this year in an Ikea bag. The circumstances remain unclear. Switzerland has also returned a 3,400-year-old fragment of a statue of Ramesses II to Egypt.

A new American study shows that cancer mortality among young people has fallen dramatically over the past twenty years. By about 25 percent. The largest decline occurred in cancer mortality among young children. While in 2001 2.75 young people per 100,000 inhabitants died of cancer, in 2021 this was still 2.1.

Almost 60 percent – ​​in no other sea are so many shark and ray species threatened as in the Mediterranean. The countries surrounding the Mediterranean Sea have decided this year to protect six endangered species of sharks and rays. In addition, important breeding areas for sharks have been recognized in Turkey and Croatia.

New York’s Staten Island neighborhood once had mountains of trash as tall as the Statue of Liberty. What was once the largest garbage dump in the world is now gradually becoming a park. The first part opened in October this year. Freshkills Park is expected to be completed in 2036 and will cover an area three times the size of Central Park.

Artificial intelligence is playing an increasingly important role in medicine. According to a new study, a ten-second recording of your voice should be enough to detect type 2 diabetes. In combination with general information such as age, gender, height and weight, an AI model is created. This can then detect whether the person suffers from type 2 diabetes.

Heart attacks should also be easier to predict thanks to AI. as shown by research funded by the British Heart Foundation. And AI is just getting started: the possibilities seem limitless.

In total, approximately 9,000 square kilometers of the Brazilian Amazon were deforested between August 2022 and July 2023. The area corresponds to about a quarter of the surface of Switzerland. As the National Institute for Space Research in Brazil announced, this is a decrease of more than 22 percent compared to the previous year. It is also the first time since 2018 that less than 10,000 square kilometers of Amazon forests have been cleared in Brazil.

The video featuring Taters is 15 seconds long. The cat is chasing a red dot – as cats like to do. What’s special: The video was sent from about 20 million miles away. It is the first Ultra HD video to be sent to Earth with a laser from such a distance.

NASA hopes the experiment will also make it possible to transmit other high-bandwidth data from space in the future. This would help in carrying out manned missions beyond Earth orbit. Better communications capabilities could pave the way for sending humans to Mars, NASA says. The American space agency calls the successful broadcast of the video a historic milestone.