• At 1.9%, Nebraska now has the lowest unemployment rate of any state, ever. Wall Street Journal.
• Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is recovering from life-threatening coral bleaching episodes. NPR.
• A new stem-cell treatment has cured a man of Type-1 Diabetes. The New York Times.
• US jobless claims hit 52-year low after seasonal adjustments. AP News.
• Portugal goes coal-free long before deadline. CNN.

For more good news, check out The Progress Network, Future Crunch, and Reasons to be Cheerful.

These are crazy times, right? We haven’t had a do a wide-scale quarantine like this since the 1918 Flu. It’s good this sort of thing doesn’t happen more than once every 100 years or so. At least we can learn from the past. Looking at the 1918 Flu, we know social distancing does slow the spread of the disease and saves lives. It might need to last months, but that’s better than ending it early. The most important take-away is we’ve been through this before, we can go through it again. Plus, we have much better medical technology now than we did then, so it likely won’t be as bad as 1918. Continue reading →