Not everything was bad in 2020, and as food is for the body as information is for the mind, we will say goodbye to 2020 with the good news of a year that we will not forget.
Vaccine
The best of 2020 is undoubtedly the discovery of the vaccine against Sars Cov-2.
Slim Gene
Scientists may have discovered a gene that helps skinny individuals stay slim, thereby enhancing new treatments for obesity
The Boy from Kenya
Stephen Wamulota, a nine-year-old from Kenya, invented a wooden hand washing machine. This machine consists of pedals in order to avoid touching the surfaces and help to reduce the spread of the corona virus. With one foot he turns a bucket of water and with the other foot the liquid soap. Stephen says he wants to be an engineer when he grows up.
Pandas
One Monday morning, in the confines of the Hong Kong Zoo, with no one to watch, or cheer for, that Ying Ying and Le Le – two resident pandas who have lived together for a decade – decided to have fun and create one little miracle. According to reports from the Zoo, pandas have been trying since 2010 but without success. They started dating in March of this year and it took a pandemic for Hong Kong residents to find a baby panda.
Lebanon Nurse
Pamela Zeinoun, a nurse at Saint George’s Hospital in Beirut, cared for five babies with various health problems that needed to be kept in incubators when the port exploded, destroying the building. After the explosion, Zeinoun was able to enter the room with the help of a father and another nurse and managed to find the babies. Two were saved by the father and the nurse, and Pamela took the remaining three. On the run, Zeinoun separated himself from the others. She needed to get the babies to another hospital quickly. Their survival depended on incubators. Zeinoun walked for 40 minutes in the dark with the three babies in his arms. When he arrived at the next hospital, he found injured workers in a damaged building without incubators. He started walking again, since no car passed because of the damage. Surprisingly, the babies were not crying and Zeinoun feared that they were not alive. In the end, after 5 kilometers of walking in the chaos and rubble, Pamela found a car that took her to a functioning hospital outside Beirut, where she placed the three babies in an incubator to keep them warm and safe.
Library
When Melbourne’s Yarra Plenty regional libraries first closed in March, workers were sent home with a telephone. The library team removed from their database the telephone number of each member of their library over 70 years old, for a total of 8,000 records. They started calling these members to find out if they needed help, like access to services, advice, or more technical help and to help them get what they needed. Some conversations lasted 5 minutes and others more than half an hour. Yarra Plenty’s librarians were able to speak to all of their elderly members during Melbourne’s first confinement.
