Real Life/Heartwarming/Science


 * This video and this video, featuring a baby boy and a 29 year old woman respectively, both born deaf, hearing for the first time. Medical science gave them their hearing, and in this editor's experience, no one who has seen these videos has failed to choke up in the good way.
 * Jonas Salk's greatest achievement was developing the vaccine for Polio, a disease so widespread and crippling in parts of the world that China had 80 million people vaccinated in 1993, and is still a big problem in third world countries. A man who could have become one of the richest scientists in the history of humanity said these words when regarding a patent: "Could you patent the sun?" Because of this work, Polio went from hundreds of thousands of case per year to about a thousand... Tens of millions of children, able to walk, because a man would rather do the right thing rather than get rich.
 * This is so heartwarming, that Jonas Salk being the original "Good Guy Greg" (a reddit macro series) is practically a meme.
 * In a poor Malawian village racked by cholera, famine, and superstition, a young boy gets kicked out of school because he can't afford the tuition. The boy, however, loves science and learning, and is determined to keep learning. So....he fishes out scraps of books from the local dumpster. He finds a book on basic electricity, and sees a picture of a windmill that generates electricity. His imagination sparked, he spends the next year and a half digging through trash cans and other stuff people have either thrown away or are about to throw away; to find the parts necessary to make his windmill. People call him mad, but his parents tell him to keep working at it. One day, the boy calls his village together (Please keep in mind, the highest technology anybody in the village owns is an AA battery and maybe a walkman) and holds up a single light bulb attached to a windmill that looks like a reject from a Dr. Seuss book. The villagers laugh at him....UNTIL....the light bulb flickers. As the wind picks up, the rickety windmill spins, and suddenly the light bulb shines, like a single candle in the night. The stunned villagers cheer the boy wildly. Soon word of the boy's genius spreads (remember, he basically just brought his village out of the third world, a feat that whole governments sometimes fail to achieve). The new found hi-tech is used to aid in getting clean water to use for the crops, thus alleviating the devastating famine. And the kicker... the boy gets a scholarship to COLLEGE in South Africa and is called a hero by Al Gore himself. Nobody has the audacity to make up a story like this. Just Google William Kamkwamba. Better yet, here's a entry on him from The Other Wiki.
 * For all of humanity's obsession with the Robot War trope and all its related tropes, anecdotal evidence from the US military suggests that humans seem to be perfectly capable of bonding with their robotic brothers-in-arms. It doesn't even matter that the robots are not sentient or not designed to evoke a sympathetic response; humans develop attachments to them, assign personalities to them, risk their lives to save them and mourn their destruction. It kind of gives you hope that if/when true Artificial Intelligence is developed, humanity will be able to peacefully coexist with it.