(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . From the GNR Newsroom: Its the Monday Good News Roundup [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-02-06 Welcome back to the Monday Good News Roundup, where our intrepid team of good news finders (Myself, Killer300 and Bhu) find the good news to keep you going. Today starts an exciting new chapter in my life: I’m getting my own internet instead of using my neighbors. Its gonna cost a bit more money, but now I will be able to react better when my internet goes out. Plus I’ll be getting cheaper phone service, which is also nice. Bu that’s enough personal news. Onto the good news. An old law may eliminate the housing-related zoning ordinances of the vast majority of cities throughout the Bay Area. Yes, seriously. It’ll occur this Wednesday, too. Developers will be allowed to propose housing (and only housing) at any height and any density in a city, so long as at least 20% of the homes in the proposed building are deed-restricted to low income residents who make at or less than 80% the area median income. Alternatively, 100% affordable to moderate income residents where rents don’t exceed 120% area median income. Sounds like a huge win for affordable housing, which is very good news indeed. Boston Metal, an MIT spinout working to curb emissions from steelmaking, on Friday said it raised $120 million in Series C funding to expand green steel production in Massachusetts and beyond. International steel giant ArcelorMittal led the investment round, which also included Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund and SiteGround Capital. With the latest funding, Boston Metal has raised over $200 million since launching from an MIT lab in 2012. The future is looking more green every day, but we have to keep it up. Years of analysis have made it clear that replacing most of the coal plants in the United States with a mix of solar panels, wind turbines and lithium-ion batteries can save billions of dollars and prevent air pollution while fighting climate change. Now, with Inflation Reduction Act tax credits and federal financing on the table, the coal-to-clean transition is not just more cost-effective than ever before — it can also be accomplished by building clean energy close to retiring coal plants. Ah the IRA, the little legislation that could pulls it off again. More great news for the environment. Adopted by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors as official policy in 2020, the Care First, Jails Last agenda includes a detailed set of recommendations that ​“aim to provide treatment and services to those in need, instead of arrest and jail.” Among them are mandates to dramatically scale back cash bail, broaden implementation of community-based harm reduction strategies, channel funding to programs for at-risk youth, establish pretrial services in highly impacted communities to replace law-enforcement supervision, provide beds for those released from jail who are in need of interim or supportive housing, and create urgent care centers to provide trauma-informed mental healthcare throughout the county. To make sure that these policies would actually be carried out — and that budget shortfalls would not be used as an excuse for stonewalling — activists secured a funding stream that is set to channel hundreds of millions of dollars each year toward alternatives-to-incarceration initiatives. In the wake of the George Floyd mobilizations, organizers successfully pushed for the passage of Measure J, requiring that 10 percent of the county’s unrestricted general funds be invested in implementing the agenda. In principle, this could translate to well over $300 million annually. Vox called it ​“perhaps the most significant victory for the police reform movement since [the] summer’s protests.” This is a good start but we can keep it up, we have to do more to make a better tomorrow. Oregon’s new governor just put her state on a mission to accelerate homebuilding by 80 percent. But her influence on housing growth began before she took office. Starting on January 3, more than a week before Governor Tina Kotek’s inauguration, housing projects around Oregon started springing to life. Thirteen homes on an oddly shaped scrap of land near a Beaverton rail stop. Eighty-four new affordable apartments just outside Troutdale’s walkable downtown. A 12-room residential care home that’d help relieve the state’s painful hospital-bed shortage. Great news for Oregon to be sure. The world has enough rare earth minerals and other critical raw materials to switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy to produce electricity and limit global warming, according to a new study that counters concerns about the supply of such minerals. With a push to get more electricity from solar panels, wind turbines, hydroelectric and nuclear power plants, some people have worried that there won’t be enough key minerals to make the decarbonization switch. Rare earth minerals, also called rare earth elements, actually aren’t that rare. The U.S. Geological Survey describes them as a “relatively abundant.” They’re essential for the strong magnets necessary for wind turbines; they also show up in smartphones, computer displays and LED light bulbs. This new study looks at not only those elements but 17 different raw materials required to make electricity that include some downright common resources such as steel, cement and glass. Even if we didn’t have enough of these materials we would still find a way to make this switch. Its never too late for a change for the better. Also, it can help with this if we reduce dependency on automobiles, and something we can all do to help with locally. Scientists at one of the country’s premier research labs have discovered a record-cheap way to capture carbon dioxide as it’s emitted from power plants and factories, including the likes of iron and steel manufacturing facilities. Globally, industrial processes are responsible for 31 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions and electricity generation accounts for 27 percent, according to Bill Gates in his climate book, dwarfing the 16 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions that comes from the transportation sector. The new technique discovered by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory costs $39 per metric ton and is the cheapest technique for this kind of carbon capture ever reported in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. For comparison, it costs $57 per metric ton to capture carbon dioxide from a coal-fired power plant using current state-of-the-art technology, PNNL says. Once again, I have to say it. I love love LOVE living in the future. Hidden patterns purposely buried in AI-generated texts could help identify them as such, allowing us to tell whether the words we’re reading are written by a human or not. These “watermarks” are invisible to the human eye but let computers detect that the text probably comes from an AI system. If embedded in large language models, they could help prevent some of the problems that these models have already caused. For example, since OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT was launched in November, students have already started cheating by using it to write essays for them. News website CNET has used ChatGPT to write articles, only to have to issue corrections amid accusations of plagiarism. Building the watermarking approach into such systems before they’re released could help address such problems. People are still worried about the possible AI art takeover, but I still think its not gonna happen, we have too many ways to prevent it. The New York legislature on Tuesday passed an amendment to the state constitution that would enshrine abortion rights and other protections in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the federal right to abortion in Roe v. Wade. “As other states take extreme measures to stymie progress and roll back reproductive rights, New York will always lead the way to combat discrimination in all forms and protect abortion access,” Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) said in a statement on the passage. this is a twofer: One for “I am so damn proud of my state” and “The GOP done goofed when they killed Roe V Wade.” We aren’t going back, but the GOP is, to the showers. The number of cases of a painful and debilitating tropical illness fell last year to a record low, fuelling hopes that it will soon become the second human disease in history to be eradicated. Only 13 cases of guinea worm disease were reported worldwide in 2022, a provisional figure that if confirmed would be the smallest ever documented, the US-based Carter Center has said. The tiny number of cases, down from 15 the previous year, is the result of more than four decades of global efforts to stamp out the parasitic disease by mobilising communities and improving drinking water quality in transmission hotspots. Normally extinction is a bad thing but not here. I hope this sticks, Anti Vaxxers have taken so many wins from us in the past few years, we really need this. Young people and women are the key to saving democracy. That’s the takeaway from the 2022 midterm elections and what we can expect looking toward the 2024 presidential race. These groups are demanding change on critical issues including reproductive choice, student debt, the climate crisis and more. While this is a point commonly raised by pundits, the importance of one group in particular often goes unmentioned: Generation Z women. The midterms saw the second-highest level of youth turnout in three decades, with at least 27 percent of eighteen to twenty-nine-year-olds turning out to vote nationwide. Historically, the rate has hovered around 20 percent. The turnout rate was even higher in swing states such as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. According to data from Tufts University, it was Gen Z women—particularly women of color along with a distinct majority of all LGBTQ+ youth—who were the deciding factor in close Congressional races. In Pennsylvania and Arizona, the Gen Z vote exceeded 70 percent. The midterm proved that the kids are alright, and they are gonna help us get to a brighter future. Researchers at the University of Adelaide announced this week that they made clean hydrogen fuel from seawater without pre-treatment. Demand for hydrogen fuel, a clean energy source that only produces water when burned, is expected to increase in the coming years as the world (hopefully) continues to pivot away from fossil fuels. The findings could eventually provide cheaper green energy production to coastal areas. “We have split natural seawater into oxygen and hydrogen with nearly 100 per cent efficiency, to produce green hydrogen by electrolysis, using a non-precious and cheap catalyst in a commercial electrolyser,” said Professor Shizhang Qiao, the team’s co-lead. Seawater typically needs to be purified before electrolysis splits it into hydrogen and oxygen. The team says its results, using cobalt oxide with chromium oxide on its surface as the catalyst, had similar performance to a standard process of applying platinum and iridium catalysts to highly purified and deionized water. This is pretty cool. Still love living in the future. And the future is where I will be heading. One week into the future, and I will see you there sports fans. Everyone have a good week and stay positive. In spite of everything, we are winning. It may not always seem like it but we are. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/6/2151313/-From-the-GNR-Newsroom-Its-the-Monday-Good-News-Roundup Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/