Inspirational and good news.
Infants are willing to help according to a new study. The CBC is repotting that infants show altruistic behavior to help adults.
“In 84 per cent of cases, infants as young as 18 months, who were not familiar with Warneken, would help retrieve the peg. During the test, he never asked for help. He also did not thank or reward the child, since the study was designed to show if the toddlers could show altruistic behaviour.”
In 1995, an Indian doctor named Madan Kataria started a club in India which prescribes a healthy dose of humour to prolong and enrich life, and the idea (like the laughter) is contagious.
They begin by limbering up and relaxing their muscles, and then laugh with each other for hours! The club members report, not surprisingly, decreased stress and increased happiness. American researchers corroborate the story with evidence that laughter prolongs life, boosts the immune system and reduces stress.
Over 5000 laughing clubs have sprung up in India, Halifax, Illinois, and around the world. Why not start a laughing club in your area?
Salt Lake City has joined a few other American cities that offer free parking for eco-friendly vehicles. It’s an idea that encourages people to buy and use more fuel-efficent vehicles to help protect the environment.
Hopefully all cities will see the beauty in this, because smog harms the air and all things that use the air.
A program named Psiphon, being created by University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, can allow people behind firewalls to bypass them completely. The idea is to allow those living in countries that have national firewalls to get around the state’s censoring mechanisms, and access information that is otherwise hard to get at.
The way the program works is rather clever: it uses a connection port that is used by banks for secure transfer.
With no guns to fire and no cars to steal, you would think that Food Force wouldn’t be a very popular video game in today’s market. But after it launched on Yahoo Games last spring, it quickly became the most popular free game on the site, racking up 1 million downloads over the first two months.
Created by the United Nations World Food Programme, Food Force is made up of six stages, each one built around a certain aspect of the emergency food program’s operations.
Thanks, Justin!