Beyond the vaccine: positive breakthroughs of 2020

2020 has been a difficult year for everyone. The COVID-19 pandemic, and now the encouraging news of the amazing progress on vaccines, have dominated global news and conversations all year.

At the same time, the world has made real progress on many fronts throughout 2020, and some of the year’s global good news stories deserve more airtime.

Here are a few of our favourites. We have asked for ideas from our Twitter followers too, so this list will continue to grow until the very end of 2020.

1. How to watch the Jupiter and Saturn ‘great conjunction’ of 2020
2. Spread of hepatitis B in children under five, lowest in decades: WHO
3. Conservation action has prevented at least 28 extinctions since 1993
4. Surprise cave discoveries may double the time people lived in the Americas
5. Unknown language discovered in Southeast Asia
6. Egypt unveils scores of ancient coffins, statues found in Saqqara
7. Scientists engineered plastic-eating ‘super-enzymes’ that can break down bottles in days
8. Commitments to Net Zero Double in Less Than a Year