A homeless veteran left a letter. Firefighters adopted his dog.

Firefighters at Fort Worth Fire Station 8 arrived to find a dog tied up outside, sitting next to a three-page handwritten letter titled "Safe Place." The letter was from Tom, a disabled veteran who had been homeless for roughly 20 months and had run out of ways to care for the dog he called his baby. "I have nothing but my baby Jake," he wrote. "Please help my baby."

"You could tell it was written out of love," said Lt. Sam Grief of the Fort Worth Fire Department.

The department's H.O.P.E. Team, short for Home Outreach Prevention Education, went looking for Tom. Within days, Bennett's Camping Center donated an RV camper, and crews helped him get it set up and get to medical appointments. Tom said surrendering Jake was the hardest choice he ever made, but the right one.

The firefighters officially adopted Jake at Station 8. He has already claimed the best recliner.

A concrete-covered owl got donor feathers and flew home.

A great horned owl found stuck in a concrete mixer last October flew back into the wild this month, after six months of care at the Best Friends Animal Society's Wild Friends sanctuary in Kanab, Utah. A good Samaritan had called the sanctuary from 80 miles away. The team scraped off the concrete, then realized the harder problem. The owl's feathers were too damaged for silent flight, and his spring molt wasn't cooperating. So staff took a course in imping, a procedure they had never performed, which uses donor feathers and adhesive to rebuild a wing. Feathers came from a great horned owl of similar size that had died at a rescue in Northern Utah. On May 1, veterinarian Kelsey Paras and three Wild Friends staff spent 90 minutes replacing 10 primary feathers and one secondary on the right wing. The left wing needed nothing. Supervisor Bart Richwalski used a decibel reader to confirm the wingbeat was quiet enough. "I don't know that my heart was beating until I saw him leave," he said.

An asthma pill may help the body fight cancer

A drug that millions of people already take for asthma may help the immune system fight aggressive cancers, according to researchers at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine. The team, writing in Nature Cancer, found that montelukast, sold for decades under the brand name Singulair, blocks a molecule called CysLTR1 that some tumors use to recruit white blood cells called neutrophils and shield themselves from immunotherapy. When the researchers switched CysLTR1 off in mice with triple-negative breast cancer, melanoma, ovarian, colon, and prostate tumors, growth slowed and survival improved, even in cancers that had already stopped responding to treatment. "We're not just targeting the cancer, we're re-training one type of abundant immune cells in the body to fight the tumor again," said senior author Professor Bin Zhang. Because montelukast is already FDA-approved, Zhang said trials in cancer patients could begin quickly. The asthma aisle has been hiding something useful.

Tessa's mosaics gave 100 patients a break from depression

For 15 years, the Hackney Mosaic Project has been turning broken tile into public art across East London, and turning the slow work of sorting and pressing shards into something like therapy for the people who do it. Founder Tessa Hunkin, a 72-year-old architect turned artist, started the project after a chance encounter with a mental health recovery group in Westminster convinced her the repetitive concentration of mosaic-making could help people living with depression, PTSD, and addiction. Her volunteers have since installed Roman-style murals in Shepherdess Walk, 50 dog portraits in Hackney Downs Park, and floral benches at the River Place Health Centre, where more than 100 patients joined the work. "It gives people a holiday from their head," Hunkin told Spitalfields Life. "It is a simple task that requires concentration and produces something at the end, so it is never time wasted because you can see where your time has gone."

He quit engineering so his daughter would remember him.

A taxi driver in Hiroshima, Japan, told a passenger last month why he keeps a photo of his daughter in a graduation gown taped to his dashboard. She had just finished a degree in mechanical engineering. He said she was the reason he drove a cab.

He used to be an engineer himself. Good salary, late nights, lost weekends. Then his daughter told him, "I remember mom reading to me. I remember grandma cooking. I don't remember you."

So he quit. Driving let him pick his own hours, be home after school, help with homework. His wife thought he had lost his mind. He understood the trade.

Now they call each other every week. Asked if he regretted it, the driver did not pause. "Regret? No. Money comes and goes. Time only goes. I chose time."

The passenger shared the exchange on X on May 13. It has been viewed more than 46,000 times.