This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Xavier chapter.
There has been a lot of focus this past year on all of the bad that has happened, and this has had a visible impact on everyone, not only in America, but also around the world. There has been death and loss, and setbacks that affected everyone around the world. With all of the horrible news that has been circulating in 2016 and in 2017 so far, it seems as if the good things that have happened have gotten lost. So without further ado, here are some of the wonderful things that have happened in 2016-2017!
- Over 1500 underage human traffickers have been arrested already this current year. The numbers that are normally seen are around the 400-500 for the ENTIRE year, so this is a huge deal!
- NASA announced earlier this year that they had discovered a solar system with 7 Earth-like planets orbiting a single star!
- A total solar eclipse will be happening this summer on Monday, August 21st!
- Hamilton announced earlier this year that it will be going national! Now it will be a lot easier to see the well-acclaimed show!
- The March for Science will be happening on Earth Day this year, and will have sister marches all across the nation.
- Giant Pandas were downlisted to vulnerable instead of endangered in 2016. This is great news, but it doesn’t quite mean that they are out of the water yet, but it does mean that there has been some major progress to saving their species!
- Manatees were downlisted from endangered to threatened this year! This also doesn’t mean that the hard work is over yet, but some serious progress has been made!
- American Teenager High School graduation rate reached a historic high of 83.2% in the year of 2016!
- India came together and planted a record breaking amount of trees in one day, with a total close to 50 million. 800,000 people were in on this effort.
- Gravitational waves were detected at America’s LIGO center, meaning that Einstein was right!