This year has been filled with so much Good News that we could easily cover a hundred of them as we look back on 2024. From groundbreaking advancements in medical treatments to a massive increase in renewable energy, and from big wins for our environment to incredible achievements in space exploration, it’s been an exciting year, to say the least. Hi, I’m Regis, and here are the 10 best developments and news stories from 2024.
Let’s kick things off by jumping into the world of healthcare and medicine. This year we saw some groundbreaking medical trials and the approval of new innovative healthcare technologies. With the help of great minds as well as the assistance and implementation of artificial intelligence, humanity has been tackling one medical problem after another.
Take cancer treatments, for instance. This year saw the world’s very first lung cancer vaccine trials launched across seven countries around the world. The vaccine aims to train the immune system to identify and target lung cancer cells, potentially improving treatment outcomes and preventing recurrence.
Oh, and we also learned that Manuka honey can reduce breast cancer cell growth by as much as 84%. Talk about some sweet new discoveries! But one of the biggest cancer breakthroughs of the year and our number one on this list is: A new global cervical cancer treatment Cervical cancer is the fourth most common cancer among women in the world.
According to the World Health Organization, this type of cancer leads to around 660,000 new cases and 350,000 deaths every year. Now, a new treatment regime has shown to reduce the risk of dying of cervical cancer by as much as 40%! The treatment involves a short course of chemotherapy before administering chemoradiation.
Chemoradiation is a combination of chemotherapy and radiotherapy which is normally used to treat cervical cancer. By adding the initial short course chemotherapy, the mortality rate of cervical cancer patients not only dropped, but the risk of it returning within 5 years was also reduced by a whopping 35%. This new treatment has the potential to save many, many lives, and it’s already being implemented across the UK.
Hopefully, it will be adopted worldwide in the near future. This year we also saw lots of improvements in medical technologies. A very exciting story of this year involves: A man being kept alive, thanks to a titanium heart Of the estimated 50,000 patients needing a heart transplant every year, only around 5,000 heart transplant operations are performed.
The Good News is that a biotech company called Bivacor in the USA has now developed a titanium heart the size of a fist that can perform a heart’s most important function: pumping blood. This year, a 58-year-old man with end-stage heart failure in the United States became the first person in the world to receive this metal heart transplant. It was a great success, as the artificial blood pumper kept him alive for 8 days until a donor heart could be sourced.
This metal heart is expected to last for many years because its pumping mechanism produces no friction, and it’s virtually unbreakable! Just incredible stuff. Let’s now look at the strides that were made to protect the environment this year.
We’ve seen the government of Papua New Guinea pass a bill to protect the third biggest rainforest in the world. The aim of the bill is to assign Protected Zones within the New Guinea Rainforest and, in doing so, keep corporate companies out to lessen mining and logging activities. We also celebrated Australia’s renewed commitment to restore the Great Barrier Reef with innovative measures like planting heat-resistant coral species and improving water quality to boost resilience.
Beyond that, one specific story is a HUGE step in the right direction because this year: Deforestation in the Amazon dropped by almost 31% Before we go into this and even more incredible Good News from 2024, we quickly want to thank our partner CyberGhost VPN for sponsoring this video. With over 38 million users worldwide and over 20,000 excellent reviews on Trustpilot, it’s one of the best VPNs out there. So, let me quickly tell you why CyberGhost is such a great choice.
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There's a 45-day money-back guarantee so you have nothing to lose! It's a great product, we can definitely recommend it & and by signing up using our link in the description you also help us to create more Good News videos like this one. And now, back to the best Good News of 2024 and how deforestation in the Amazon dropped by almost 31%.
That’s right, deforestation in the world’s biggest tropical rainforest has dropped to its lowest in nearly a decade. After years of illegal logging and uncontrolled forest fires, the reduction of deforestation is welcoming news and a testament to the Brazilian government’s goal to restore the Amazon rainforest. Why is this so important?
Well, the Amazon is a precious part of our planet because it helps capture and store as much as 200 billion tons of carbon. To put this into perspective, humanity emitted an estimated 40 billion tons of carbon in 2022 through the burning of fossil fuels. So yeah, the better the Amazon is doing, the more carbon it can take out of the atmosphere and store away in its soil and vegetation.
There’s been many inspirational stories this year of people doing extraordinary things. The best example of this is: The young teenager who created a soap that can prevent skin cancer Born in Ethiopia, young Heman Bekele moved with his parents to the United States when he was four. At the age of 7, he was already conducting all kinds of chemical experiments.
This year, at the age of 15, he was named Time’s Kid of 2024 after developing a soap that can treat and even prevent different types of skin cancer. While the cancer-preventative soap product is far from hitting the market, it’s inspiring to see young minds like Bekele try and solve such big world problems. On we go to the renewable energy sector, who’s had a real banger of a year.
Not only is this sector on course to hit net-zero climate change goals by 2030, but there has also been great progress in moving away from coal dependency worldwide. The United Kingdom officially closed its last remaining coal plant this year and, for the first time in history, wind and solar power capacity has overtaken coal in China. And on that note, Solar power continues to make huge strides in 2024.
Between 2022 and 2023, the world experienced an estimated 87% surge in solar power installations. That surge has grown by an additional 29% this year, and we are now on track to add 590 GW of solar power by the end of 2024. To give you an idea of how much power that is, let's assume that a 1 GW solar plant generates 1.
5 terawatt-hours of electricity annually. Or course this depends on factors like sunlight availability and panel efficiency, but it's a number that’s definitely in the realistic range. With the average household consuming 10,600 kilowatt-hours of electricity per year in regions like the U.
S. , that translates to enough energy to power around 140,000 homes annually. Now, if we scale that up to the 590 GW of solar power in 2024, this added capacity could supply over 82 million homes in the USA.
This is a big win! And in even more Good News, it seems this trend is here to stay as the forecast of solar growth shows that solar energy capacity could as much as triple by the end of this decade. Part of that win for solar energy this year is that The world’s biggest solar farm came online in China.
In June this year, China switched on a solar farm that’s so enormous it’s more than twice the size of Manhattan in New York. This 3. 5 GW solar farm is situated in the desert area of the capital Urumqi in Xinjiang, West China, and will generate around 6 billion kilowatt hours of electricity each year.
That’s enough power to light up a country like Papua New Guinea for an entire year! Digging further into the vast field of technology, there have been some exciting tech innovations throughout 2024. For example, Quantum computing is evolving, with companies like Google creating quantum computing chips that are so fast, they can calculate what would take a normal supercomputer 10 septillion years in just five minutes.
That’s more years than the age of our universe! But of course, we can’t talk about 2024 technologies without going into: The growth and applications of artificial intelligence This year, we learned how A. I.
is being used to better detect cancer. Called “C the Signs,” this newly developed A. I.
uses a special algorithm that can scan through patients’ records and find patterns and warning signs of possible cancer. By using this A. I.
, the detection rate jumped from 58% to 66%, resulting in thousands more cases in the U. K. being accurately identified.
We’ve also gone from A. I. creating some, uhm, questionable images, to the latest technologies that are able to render incredible life-like videos.
A. I. is also being used to predict natural disasters.
For instance, in October this year, meteorologists in the U. S. successfully used A.
I. to predict that Hurricane Milton would make landfall near Siesta Key in Florida. In knowing these things, communities can better prepare for possible floods and destruction, and it’s all thanks to A.
I. getting better and better. From down here on Earth up into the great big sky, let’s now look at the inspiring stories in the realm of space exploration.
This year we saw SpaceX catch its Super Heavy booster with giant mechanical arms as it safely returned back to the launchpad. There have been some amazing cosmic discoveries captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, including potentially spotting the earliest and most distant galaxies ever seen by mankind. We’ve also seen NASA create a Solar Sail System that could allow spacecraft to use sunlight for propulsion in the near future.
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And now, let's talk about one of the biggest events in space exploration this year: The first ever civilian space walk In September this year, SpaceX launched four civilians into space. Two of them got to experience a spacewalk for themselves. Led by billionaire and mission commander Jared Isaacman, the Polaris Dawn mission saw Isaacman himself and SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis become the first civilians to enjoy a one hour and 46 minute spacewalk.
This was also done to test new spacesuits for future space exploration as well as laser-based satellite communication in space. More of these missions are planned for the near future. Back here on Earth, humanity has made some wonderful social progress, too.
This year saw Thailand sign its landmark same-sex marriage bill that will provide legal, financial and medical rights to all married partners. Ghana passed its Gender Equality Act to include more women in decision-making and leadership roles across the country. And another huge story of the year was that Insulin prices dropped significantly in the United States.
At least 8 million U. S. citizens need insulin to treat their diabetes.
And while prices have been skyrocketing for the last decade, three of the country’s biggest insulin manufacturers — who own almost 90% of the market — have now capped their pricing at $35 per month. That is, for anyone on Medicare. To put that into perspective, it used to cost the average diabetic in the U.
S. $12,000 a year to get their insulin treatments. The Democratic Party is now trying to pass legislation that could see people without Medicare but with commercial insurance also benefit from the price cap.
This drop in insulin prices is really Good News and a long time coming, because by making people’s monthly prescriptions more affordable, millions of lives can be saved. And finally, our last and probably most impactful development of the year — drum roll, please! Global life expectancy keeps increasing in 2024 Yes, an increase in life expectancy has been one of mankind’s greatest achievements, even though people hardly talk about it.
Back in 1900, the average life expectancy of a newborn was only 32 years. Today, that number is around 74. Not just that, but forecasts show that by the year 2050, we can expect an average life expectancy of just under 80 years.
Furthermore, the global life expectancy gap is closing. Back in the 1950s, North Americans, Europeans and people from Australia and Oceania had a life expectancy in the 60s, while Asia and Latin America was capped in the 40s. By the year 2000, both Asia and Latin America were already starting to close that gap, and the projections show that this game of catch-up will only continue.
Even in Africa, the numbers are improving, so it’s great to see some Good News affecting every single one of us on the planet. Of course, it’s things like medical advancements, price cappings and other stories on our list today that helps us to literally live longer. A lot of good has happened in 2024, and we can’t wait to keep you up to date on what happens in 2025.
But what do you think? Any predictions for the new year? Leave us your thoughts in the comments, and If you want to try CyberGhostVPN, make sure to use our link in the description.
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Thank you for an amazing 2024. We wish you a happy start to the new year. See you then!
