Positive news magazine #1

Polish Olympian sells Rio medal to save three-year-old battling cancer

Piotr Malachowski. Photo: Reuters

Polish discus thrower Piotr Malachowski, who took silver at the Rio Olympics, said that he auctioned off his medal this week to fund treatment for a three-year-old boy struck with cancer.

The 33-year-old world champion wrote on his Facebook page that he was moved to auction his prize after receiving a letter from the mother of a boy called Olek who said he had been battling eye cancer for two years and that treatment in New York was his only hope.

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Can simply showing people their own DNA change their attitudes towards others? 

To celebrate diversity in the world Momodo asked 67 people from all over the world to take a DNA test. 

It turns out that they have much more in common with other nationalities than they would ever have imagined. 

To help his village a Malawian teenager harnesses the wind

A Malawian teenager, William Kamkwamba, taught himself how to build a windmill out of junk and bring power to his village.  He then went on to build a second larger windmall to power irrigation pumps.  He did all this from books he read in the library.

Instead of buying a yacht, this person is sending an entire kindergarten class to college

26 kindergarten students at Rio Vista Elementary School in the US State of California have just had their educational futures guaranteed by a stranger.

Marty Burbank and his wife Seon are pledging to fund 2 years of community college and 2 years at a California State University or the equivalent amount for a University of each students’ choice.

Full story here

Seven contestants compete in the world's first love competition at the Stanford MRI lab

Filmmaker Brent Hoff enlisted the Stanford Center for Cognitive Neurobiological Imaging to hold the world’s first ever ‘love competition’. Seven contestants had five minutes in an fMRI machine to love someone ‘as hard as they can’. 

The idea that love can be measured may seem deeply unromantic: the results were anything but.