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Have a Happy Thought: If I were to tell you a story about a woman with spiral side-buns on her head who crossed an insurmountable barrier in order to “take out a power station in order to allow the rebel forces to attack during night without being seen”… you’re probably thinking of this fictional character: Image: Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia from Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope   Would you be surprised to learn that the quote above is actually about this, real, historical woman: Image: Coronela Clara de la Rocha in the book Las Soldaderas: Women of the Mexican Revolution, alongside her father, General Herculano de la Rocha. Images of Clara de la Rocha, along with images of Hopi women (Native Americans of the US Southwest) were all used as inspirations for the indefatigable, undefeatable, inspiring Princess Leia. Oh, and that daring night raid that Clara carried out? That was far from her only contribution to...

Have a Happy Thought: Humans on bicycles are the most energy efficient animal movement we have yet discovered. In the chart below, animals (as well as human-created vehicles) are plotted on a graph showing energy cost of transport, per weight. The bottom-right corner is the most efficient – moving the most weight for the least amount of effort.​ ​ DTAN Studio; Sources: “Energetic Cost of Locomotion in Animals,” by Vance A. Tucker, in  Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology , Vol. 34; June 15, 1970 ( most data ); chart by Dan Todd in “Bicycle Technology,” by S. S. Wilson, in  Scientific American , Vol. 228, No. 3; March 1973 ( data for human on a bicycle ); Tyson Hedrick/University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill ( velomobile calculation )   So for example a fruit fly and a bee are very light, but not very efficient because it turns out that flying is very “metabolically expensive”. Things that can swim, like salmon, can be really efficient due to body shape bu...

  Have a Happy Thought: Renewable energy is good for the planet, and our bank accounts… turns out it can also be visually stunning!   Image: Bill Liao Floating Solar panels in Walden Image: Dennis Schroeder Lenghu, Qinghai Province, with tourists at the Heidu Mountain Scenic Area and nearby wind turbines, June 2023. © Weimin Chu   Tala Desert, Qinghai Province: Solar power is used to transform the barren land into grassland. The herders raise “Photovoltaic sheep” to prevent the grass from growing too tall, June 2025. © Weimin Chu   This week for #ShareGoodNewsToo: We’ve now gone the longest time since a nuclear explosion since the first one in 1945. That is, it’s been eight years and five months without a nuclear explosion (the most recent one was a test in North Korea on September 3 rd , 2017).       More images from Weimin Chu as well as more of the story on Powering change: a visual journey into China’s green transitio...