Eddy's Good News: An 800 year old medieval treasure and Britain's loudest birds are back!

Virgin Radio

31 Mar 2022, 09:07

Every day during his show on Virgin Radio, Eddy Temple-Morris brings you Good News stories from around the world, to help inject a bit of positivity into your day!!

Be sure to listen each day between 10am and 1pm (Monday - Friday) to hear Eddy's Good News stories (amongst the finest music of course), but if you miss any of them you can catch up on the transcripts of Eddy's most recent stories below:

Friday 1st April 2022

Good news from here in the UK as a Suffolk boy gets an amazing bit of beginners luck on his first day with a metal detector and found a religious treasure!

Say hello to 10 year old George Henderson, whose dad Paul got him into metal detecting and it was in a field in Woodbridge when he got his first major beep, dug down a mere five inches and found what’s turned out to be a medieval treasure, a thirteenth century copper alloy seal which depicts the Virgin Mary and Child with a Latin seal which translates as ‘Seal of the Priory and Convent of Butley, of Adam, Canon Regular.’The field George found the seal in is connected to Butley Priory, a religious house for canons founded in 1171. Adam  - whom this seal belonged to - served as its prior from 1219 to 1235 and he would have used this to press into melted soft wax to seal his official correspondence.The brilliant bit of Sufflok history went under the hammer and sold for the lion's share of five grand, which of course George will split down the middle with the farmer whose land he found it on.

Via: goodnewsnetwork.org

Great news from here in the UK and britain's loudest bird, once extinct, is making a great comeback.

Say hello to the Bittern, an beautiful aquatic bird, I saw one the other weekend in the London Wetlands Centre in Barnes - awesome place - and I didn’t appreciate what a big deal that was because the bittern was declared extinct from these shores because of hunting and loss of wetland habitat by the turn of the last century. It took until 1997, around a hundred years later for the RSPB to count just eleven male bitterns which sounds bitternly depressing, but now, 25 years later and with more wetlands and rewilding projects around the UK, that number has grown to 228! So it’s still a big deal to see one, and their amazing camouflage makes them hard to spot around the reeds they love to hunt in but you can certainly hear them. They sound like someone blowing over a giant bottle and that can be heard three miles away!

Via: bbc.co.uk

Thursday 31st March 2022

If you’ve ever had feelings of envy towards the reflective armour worn by Predator that renders him invisible, or you’re a Harry Potter fan and you’ve always wanted an invisibility cloak then this UK invention could be for you: Say hello to London based Invisibility Shield Company, who decided now is the time to invent a thing that makes you invisible!

It’s an oblong shield that renders whoever is behind it invisible by cleverly bending light away from the observer, so you just see a very slightly blurred version of the background. It’s very Mission Impossible too.They’ve made an entry level one that’s 12” by 8” which would hide most guinea pigs - not the absolute ham I saw on Instagram the other day - that’s £49 and a 3’1” x 2’1’ which a human can hide behind, that’s a more hefty £299. It’s a Kickstarter project, they’ve made 20 and they’re looking for £5000 worth of pledges to make more…not surprisingly they’re currently past their five grand target at just shy of £117,000!!

Via kickstarter.com

Good news from France as a perfectly preserved sarcophagus is discovered under the floor of Notre-Dame and it’s been hailed as a ‘remarkable scientific discovery’.

I always say it only takes time to find positivity and inspiration from any tragedy and that’s certainly the case beneath the floor of Paris’s most famous religious landmark which tragically burned down. If that hadn’t happened, they would probably never have discovered this “completely preserved, human-shaped sarcophagus made of lead.”

Archeologists have had a peek inside via one of those little fibre optic cameras and are delighted to confirm they can see a body inside. It’s been dated back to the 13th Century and is obviously the remains of somebody really important to have been buried there and in a custom made lead coffin to preserve them. They can see fabric, hair and a pillow made of leaves (a custom for religious leaders) and they’re excited because if the leaves survived that long that means the body will be fascinatingly well preserved.

via goodnewsnetwork.org

Wednesday 30th March 2022

Good news from Spain where the world’s first recyclable wind turbine blade has been built and tested successfully.

Wind turbines and what to do with those enormous blades has become a thing. I’ve shared with you right here, good news stories of the ingenious ways they’re recycling them. In Ireland they’re turning them into very cool looking bridges for pedestrians and cyclists to get across canals and suchlike. In the Netherlands, where almost everybody has a bicycle, they’ve created wonderfully curvaceous looking cycle parking and the coolest bus shelters you’ve ever seen. We need great design ideas like this for the thousands of these which come to the end of their primary lifespan but thanks to the ZEBRA (Zero Waste Blade Research) project, lots of companies in Europe and the US including General Electric have united to come up with a 62m (203-foot) blade made using a thermoplastic resin called Elium, which is fully recyclable and a game changer for this rapidly growing way to harvest clean and sustainable energy from mother nature.

Via: goodnewsnetwork.org

A pawsome story now - it’s been a while since we’ve had a cat related tale - and from here in the UK as a kleptomaniac cat has stolen so much stuff that his owners have started an honesty box for people to reclaim their belongings.

Say hello to Charlie, and his mum, Alice Bigge, who’s from Bristol. Alice rescued Charlie and gave him a forever home but as soon as Charlie was allowed out, he started bringing back little thank you gifts. Toy cars, plastic animals, balls and clothes pegs. Charlie was obviously very grateful because the gifts started getting bigger and bigger…glasses, he had a big miniature skateboard phase apparently,  he even half inched a rubber duck and Alice is still scratching her head how he got that through the cat flap?His cat burglary has become so prolific - or is that pawlific? - that she’s started an honesty box outside their home with a sign that says ‘Kleptocat’ and asks people to help themselves to whatever they are missing!

Via: goodnewsnetwork.org

Tuesday 29th March 2022

Good news from the US and Mackenzie Scott, Jeff Bezos ex-wife has done it again, giving a whopping $436 million dollars away, this time to a charity that specialises in affordable housing for those who are struggling to find a place they can call home.

Say hello and congratulations to Habitat For Humanity, a charity launched by Jimmy Carter, who’ve just had a game-changing donation by the Amazon boss’s ex who got 4% of Amazon’s shares in her divorce and who pledged to give away half of it and keep giving it! I think this is the third time in as many years her amazing generosity has got her a mention in these Good News stories. She’s a key pledger in the Giving Pledge, an amazing club of billionaires who’ve pledged to give half of their wealth away to charities and nonprofits and she’s already given BILLIONS. Interestingly Mackanzie’s ex Jeff Bezos refused to sign up. Habitat For Humanity is active in 70 different countries and they’ve already earmarked hundreds of thousand of dollars to help Ukrainian refugees get roofs over their heads. 

Via: goodnewsnetwork.org

Mind Blowing news from the oceans of the world and news that dolphins have their own form of social media, and just like ours (minus the toxicity of course) it’s incredibly useful for maintaining networks of friends and for males to get dolphin dates!

Say g’day to marine biologists at The University Of New South Wales, who’ve been studying this and discovered that male dolphins have special, long distance musical whistles that lets other dolphins know lots of information. We know, for example, that dolphins have names, musical logos if you like, that are unique to them, which they’re taught at birth and which stay with them all their lives, so when a male dolphin broadcasts these long distance whistles then other dolphins can - just like Facebook - know who they’re about to meet before they’ve met them. They might also know who’s in their immediate family or friend group. It’s a brilliant bit of evolution, long distance social bonding which scientists have revealed in this fascinating study, helps in reproduction. The males with the biggest networks of long distance friends father more baby dolphins. So, yesh, they’re using their social media for the same thing humans do ;)

Via: goodnewsnetwork.org

Monday 28th March 2022

Potentially great news from Switzerland and a breakthrough in the study of Parkinson’s disease. According to parkinsons.org there are currently around 145,000 people in the UK living with this degenerative neurological condition which attacks and degrades the dopaminergic neurons. 

That much we know. We also know that some people are more susceptible, or looking at it the other way, more protected in some way, and here’s where it gets interesting. Neuro boffins at University Of Geneva have been looking at the disease's genetics via fruit flies and discovered that a gene called fer2 protects these vital neurons from being degraded. But is this applicable to humans? What does it mean for us and our loved ones? If we can overproduce this gene somehow, or introduce it another way, like cutting edge gene editing, then we can stop it in its tracks.So far we know it works on fruit flies, next step is to see if it works on mice and if it does then there’s every chance it’ll work on humans and we’ll be looking at a new way to treat Parkinsons and that is awesome news.

Via: goodnewsnetwork.org

Good news from here in the UK as we take a deeper drive into a story you may have heard last week about our very own Royal Mint recycling computers to mine the gold that’s in them - but it’s how they’re doing it that’s the really interesting thing.

You probably know that the circuit boards that underpin the brains of computers have gold in them because it’s such a good conductor - hi fi nerds know this and have gold plated cables for this reason - and when they’re recycled they’re traditionally sent to places like China where the gold is extracted in a horrifically unsustainable way. But thanks to a Canadian company called Excir, there is now a patented way to extract almost all the gold from these things in a way that has a negligible effect on the environment and that’s the process our mint is using to extract the stuff. This way most ethical investors can get their hands, or pension plans on the precious stuff!

Via: goodnewsnetwork.org