Bare hands, a Yeti cup, and one woman saved

An off-duty FDNY firefighter punched through a sunroof with his bare hands Wednesday night to pull a woman from her flooding car on the Jackie Robinson Parkway in Queens. Travis Langan, a former U.S. Marine, was driving home when flash floods stranded vehicles along the highway. He pulled over. A bystander pointed out a Tesla Model 3 nearly submerged, with elementary school principal Carmen Pinto pressed against the glass, running out of air.

"I just started punching my way through," Langan said. Then Pinto handed him a Yeti cup from inside the car, and he used that too. "I started ripping the glass."

He pulled her out. On Friday the two reunited at FDNY headquarters, where Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Commissioner Lillian Bonsignore honored him. Pinto noted Langan could have kept driving home to his pregnant wife and daughters. He stopped instead. She sat down to dinner with her family that night.

The rescue dog bit him awake before the fire reached him

A 9-month-old rescue dog named Hazel bit her sleeping owner awake last Friday in Whakatāne, New Zealand, as fire tore through the house the two had just begun to share. He escaped with smoke inhalation. The house did not survive. Hazel had been surrendered twice before he adopted her from JDC Rescue, the second time by an owner who, the shelter wrote online, decided to make a lifestyle change. The adoption was barely a week old when the fire started. Firefighters were called early, but locals told Stuff the blaze outran them. "His dog actually bit him and woke him up," property manager Christina Eichler told Stuff. "If his dog wasn't there, he wouldn't be here." Dora Motateanu of JDC Rescue said the man's decision to take Hazel home had saved her life, and that Hazel had now returned the favor inside of a week.

Susan, 108, is cleared to drive until she's 115.

Susan Young Browne, who just celebrated her 108th birthday in Dover, Delaware, has been cleared to drive until 2033. That would put her behind the wheel at 115. The state of Delaware, apparently, sees no reason to argue with her.

Browne grew up on a Delaware farm in 1918, without running water or electricity, during segregation. She graduated from Delaware State College for Colored Students, now Delaware State University, in 1945 and went on to teach in a one-room schoolhouse for three decades. She married twice and has children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

These days she turns up three times a week at the Modern Maturity Center for group exercise. "When I get up in the morning, I have an exercise routine that I've been doing for the last 20 years," she said. "I walked around that classroom for 30 years. I am not going to sit down."

130 people came to her birthday party, including Governor Matt Meyer. She was given a parking spot reserved for guests over 100. She will need it.

She sang into a broom. Sixty years later, she's still going.

Patti LaBelle turns 82 on Sunday, and she is spending the decade, by her own description, "living it down, not up." That mostly means Saturday night card games at her home in Philadelphia, where she grew up as a shy girl named Patsy Holt who sang into a broom in her bedroom. "How easy is it to play cards and take other folks' money?" she told CBS Sunday Morning. "That's what I do, and I love it." Six decades into her career, the Godmother of Soul is still performing. She said her voice can rap and can do opera, on a good day. She remembers the record executive who renamed her LaBelle, meaning beautiful, while calling her "quite ugly." She kept the name and got her nose done, and nothing else. "It's never my last show," she said. "I'll be singing until I can't no more."

Making your kid laugh builds their brain, scientists say

Making children laugh is doing more than passing the afternoon. According to Dr. Jacqueline Harding, an early childhood expert at Middlesex University in northwest London, laughter helps build the architecture of a child's developing brain, soothing the nervous system and laying groundwork for resilience and learning.

In her new book, The Brain That Loves to Laugh, Harding draws on neuroimaging and developmental research to argue that humor predates speech in the brain and engages a wide network of regions, including the prefrontal cortex. Laughter lowers cortisol, raises dopamine and endorphins, strengthens the immune system, and improves memory. It also boosts oxytocin during parent-child play, which deepens emotional bonds and, usefully, reduces parental burnout.

Harding says parents do not need a stand-up routine. Eye contact, closeness, and shared silliness do the work. "When we see children laugh," she writes, "we witness the brilliance of the brain in action: learning, connecting, and growing."