Inspirational and good news.
I’m happy to tell everyone about the Happiness Project which is a blog about one thing: happiness. On the site is a list of five simple things that you can do to make other people have a great day!
Often, the nicest gift isn’t something that can be purchased. We don’t always have time to perform a heroic act of thoughtfulness, but even quick good deeds can make a difference.
This just shows that small things can make a world of difference.
Via Lifehacker
A robotic jacket has been designed to help patients suffering from paralysis heal. By using compressed air the jacket can help strengthen the upper body as the patient recovers. This thing looks neat and I like to think that one day this technology can help with my knee pain.
Sensors at the elbow and wrist allow a healthy arm to control the eight artificial muscles, which are powered by compressed air, on the paralyzed side.
Here in Toronto city hall continues to not act on taking down illegal signs, even in their own neighbourhood. There are a lot of them, and I mean a lot. It’s rather shocking actually. What’s a Torontonian going to do?
Start a blog about it at IllegalSigns.ca!
IllegalSigns.ca is a team of volunteers who fight illegal billboards and this is our blog. Half the billboards in Toronto are illegal — help us bring the vast, unlawful privatization of our public visual environment to an end.
Please pardon this Toronto-centric post.
May sound a bit strange, but the Labatt family has recently donated the largest philanthropic gift ever made for children’s cardiac medicine and research in North America! Arthur Labatt and his wife Sonia (owners of the Labatt Brewery in Canada) have donated $30 million dollars to Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children, known for it’s acceptional cardiac department. The plan is to build the Labatt Family Heart Centre as well as provide additional funding to the Labatt Brain Tumour Research Centre, originally created and funded by the beer family in 1997. Having been treated at the hospital himself Arthur Labatt wants to ensure “that we don’t lose the [medical] talent we’ve got here.”
Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children is one of the largest and best centers for childrens medicine in the World. Through their research last year they have been able to reverse type 1 diabetes in mice! Human trials begin this year, and with donations such as this, more important funding can go toward research in their 8 other departments!
Can’t sleep? Take heart in a recent study of insomnia: researchers at Actelion Pharmaceuticals found that blocking brain receptors to the blood peptide orexin promoted sleep in rats, dogs and humans, according to a paper in the online issue of Nature Medicine.
In an ironic link, orexin is absent in the brains of people who have narcolepsy, the disorder that causes some people to fall asleep.
Although the company doing the research is a pharmaceutical company (which normally raises red flags as to the reliability of the results), more studies may be done to analyze the quality of sleep that the subjects experienced.