This week’s positive news

Good morning!

Here’s Monday’s positive news, just like usual. Hope you have a good week!

Female medical students from Afghanistan are allowed to complete their studies in Scotland

This week, 19 female medical students from Afghanistan were welcomed to Scotland, where they have been invited to finish their studies after having to interrupt them when the Taliban came to power. The security, bureaucratic and legal logistics have taken three years to arrange. Among other things, Scotland has changed its laws so that the women do not have to pay for their studies, which foreign students normally have to do. Above all, it is the organization The Linda Norgrove Foundation that pushed the case. It was founded and run by the parents of Linda, an aid worker who died in Afghanistan in 2010.

“New” material from JRR Tolkien is published

In September, material written by JRR Tolkien that has never been published before will be released. As you probably know, he is best known for The Lord of the Rings, but also wrote countless poems. The three books now being published are a collection of nearly 200 of Tolkien’s poems, 70 of which have never been published before. Tolkien had difficulty getting his poems published during his lifetime, and son Christopher Tolkien, who took over the rights to his father’s work, fought to make his father’s poems – in addition to the nearly 100 found in Lord of the Rings – more widely known. Some of the new poems touch on The Lord of the Rings, but there are also ones that touch on his own life, e.g. from his time at the front during the First World War and his time as a student at Oxford.

Easier for children to contact BRIS

Last autumn, BRIS launched an SMS function, which allows children to talk to counselors via SMS. At the launch, Magnus Jägerskog, general secretary of Bris, said: “We know that there are many vulnerable children who need support from Bris and we are happy to now be able to offer strengthened support for even more children. When children tell stories, there is hope.” The SMS function has been immensely appreciated; this summer, the organization saw an increase in the number of contacts by 28%, compared to the summer of 2023. The lion’s share of the increase has occurred precisely via the SMS channel.

Easier to develop new medications for mental illnesses

It has once again become time for a rough simplification of complex medical processes! In our brain there are so-called receptors, to which other molecules can bind. Depending on the type of receptor and molecule involved, different things happen. When developing new medicines for mental illnesses, you often have a certain receptor in mind that you want the medicine molecule to bind to. There is only one problem: you rarely know what the receptor looks like, and therefore it becomes very difficult to determine what type of molecule will bind to it. It’s like putting together a puzzle, where you don’t know what piece A looks like, and have millions of candidates for puzzle piece B. As AI has developed, machine learning has been able to help more and more. In a new study, researchers at Karolinska were able to show that AI could predict what a certain receptor looked like with an “astonishingly high precision”. About twice as many of the molecules the computer predicted would bind to the receptor did so, compared to the ones the researchers arrived at in the usual way. This type of technology will therefore make it much easier to develop medicines for several different diseases.

Endings and Sources:

These posts have got their own website! It is u/amTeapotSometimes who made it. We are having a little trouble writing the link directly in the post, but I will put it in a comment below. If you yourself have come across any positive news, you are welcome to write it in a comment or send a PM, and I can include it in next week’s post.

• Afghan medical students: 1 2 3
• Tolkien: 1 2
• BRIS: 1 2 3
• Mental illness and AI: 1 2