Here are four ways science has improved our lives over the past few weeks

Here are four Good News stories about how science is making our lives better.

1. Scientists have found a way to create nanodiamonds from PET plastics.
2. A universal and future-proof COVID-19 vaccine is set to be tested in humans soon.
3. There’s new insight into the power of random acts of kindness.
4. A woman with a keen sense of smell helped develop a simple test to diagnose Parkinson’s.

Watch the video above for the full synopsis and learn more about:

1. Scientists have found a way to make nanodiamonds from PET plastics.

Turning plastic into diamonds sounds like something out of a modern fairy tale, but an experiment originally designed to better understand planets known as ice giants, like Uranus and Neptune, has led to an unexpected discovery.

Scientists studied a phenomenon called “diamond rain,” which is believed to form due to the unique mix of elements on these planets.

They conducted the experiments using PET plastic, the polymer found in packaging like water bottles, which is a mixture of hydrogen and carbon. The team managed to mimic the process that takes place inside the ice giants by using an optical laser to create high-pressure shock waves on the plastic.

If you imagine between one and two million elephants jumping on an object at the same time, then we are talking about this type of pressure.

Researchers were thrilled when this produced tiny synthetic diamonds.

What’s really exceptional is the clarity of the results they’ve seen in the results, says Prof. Dr. Dominik Kraus from the University of Rostock, who was involved in the experiments. “A large part of the carbon atoms is converted into diamonds, very quickly in a few nanoseconds”,

“Even when the pressure is off, the diamonds stay. And that means there are ways to recover these and make them applicable and maybe use them for other things,” he told Euronews.

Artificial diamonds share many of the key properties of natural diamonds, so apart from their beauty, these nanodiamonds have potential applications in quantum technology and medicine.

The experiments were set up to better understand the planets in our solar system. “This could again be one of the many examples in the history of science where such curiosity and something that looks very far away could then lead to some real-world applications,” says Prof. Kraus.

If, as it seems, this is a new and efficient way of making nanodiamonds from the same plastic that goes to landfill every year, it could be great news for our planet.

2. A universal and future-proof COVID-19 vaccine is close to human testing.

For years, public health officials and scientists have complained about a lack of funding to develop vaccines to protect us from current and future viruses. But COVID-19 changed everything.

After the pandemic began, research groups working on universal coronavirus vaccines were allocated tens of millions of dollars, which we desperately need now if we are ever to be sure of a COVID-free future.

A universal COVID-19 vaccine would defeat any variants that may arise in the future, as well as any future diseases caused by entirely new types of coronaviruses.

The good news is that people had already started doing this long before we ever heard of Alpha, Delta, Omicron and the others.

One of those scientists was Alexander Cohen, a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, and the researchers in Cohen’s lab are getting very close to their goal.

The initial results seem very promising, as the antibodies produced in the lab’s vaccine not only identified all eight coronaviruses included in the vaccine, but also four other coronaviruses that were not included. In March this year, the group reported that the vaccine appears to protect mice and monkeys that have been exposed to a range of coronaviruses. In July, they published the results in Science.

The next step is to test the vaccine on humans, and the funding for that is already in place. If successful, it could save us from ever having to endure another COVID-related lockdown again.

3. There are new insights into the power of random favors.

Doing small acts of kindness makes everyone happy—those who give and those who receive. The strange thing, however, is that the world’s Good Samaritans tend not to realize how happy they make people, according to a new study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.

Researchers think this may prevent many of us from doing nice things for others more often, meaning people miss opportunities to feel good and make others feel good.

They ran experiments on hundreds of people who performed and received random gestures of kindness, such as buying a stranger a coffee or a cup of hot chocolate, and in all, those who performed the kind gesture consistently underestimated how positive it was would be other people feel.

The idea that being kind can increase well-being isn’t really new. Many studies have already shown how volunteering creates positive emotions on both sides.

However, experts say that each new finding strengthens the idea, making it a stronger scientific argument and not just something that seems logical.

4. A Scottish woman with a keen sense of smell helped develop a simple test to diagnose Parkinson’s.

72-year-old Joy Milne accidentally made a major breakthrough in detecting Parkinson’s disease.

She had noticed that her husband’s odor had changed 12 years before he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, noting that he had developed a musky odor that differed from his normal odor.

“Oddly enough in the morning when I wake up I don’t open my eyes, I smell what’s around me,” she said.

Joy Milne has hereditary hyperosmia; People with this condition are known as “super smellers.”

Harnessing their power, a team from the University of Manchester discovered that Parkinson’s disease actually has a specific smell.

With the help of Ms. Milne, they developed a test that could tell if someone has Parkinson’s in just three minutes.

“We just wipe people’s backs and then take them to the mass spectrometer, where we can analyze the compounds on the skin and use them to find out whether someone has Parkinson’s or not,” explains Professor Perdita Barran, who led the research euronews.

“Our focus is on creating what is known as confirmatory diagnostics for the specialist to help them get the right treatment.”

Previously, there was no specific test for Parkinson’s, and diagnosis was based on a patient’s symptoms and medical history. All that will change with a simple cotton swab.

Keep in mind that it can be difficult to find them in the headlines, but some news can be good news.