It’s easy to feel down with all the bad news out there. In fact, tragedies trended aplenty among Google, Bing and Facebook‘s most talked-about or searched-for items of 2015.
Bill Gates, however, is putting a positive spin on his year-end recap. He revealed his six favorite good-news stories from the year, and his top picks include major advancements in health care, science and technology.
“This is a tough time to feel optimistic about the future,” he writes on his blog Gates Notes. “With the notable exception of impressive global cooperation on climate change and energy, our papers and screens have been dominated for months by stories about terrorism and war. But this barrage of negative stories is obscuring the full picture of what’s happening around the world.”
His picks? First, no new polio cases reported in Africa, bringing the globe one step closer to completely eradicating that disease, and the Americas becoming the first region in the world to eliminate rubella.
Gates also picked the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine being awarded to “three researchers who developed indispensable tools for fighting diseases of the poor” as one of his favorite health-related events for the year.
Other big wins included mobile banking attracting larger numbers in developing nations, with more people tapping into financial services in Kenya, Brazil, Rwanda, Tanzania, Bangladesh and India. And SAT test prep now being free and available to all students online, making it easier for less-fortunate kids to prepare for the exam.
Gates also gives a huge shout-out to Neil deGrasse Tyson for making the public argument, inspired by Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, that science should always play a role in policy-making.
Tyson told us earlier this year that Gates is on his shortlist of sought-after potential guests for StarTalk. Perhaps 2016 is the year, Neil. There’s no better time like the present to ask!
Read Gates’ full post here. Below, enjoy the video of Tyson’s speech, which Gates posted a link to here:
