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KINDNESS • Sunny Skyz
He saved a drowning dog, then found its familyA 15-year-old named Mateo Akerman swam into a Newport Beach harbor last week to rescue a drowning dog, then tracked down the dog's family using the number on its collar. Mateo was spending the afternoon with friends on Balboa Island when they spotted a dog named George wandering near traffic. Moments later George was in the water, paddling on his own at first, then losing the fight to get back to shore. Mateo jumped in and swam out, carrying George back when the dog could no longer keep going. His friends filmed the whole thing. On land, they wrapped George in a towel, found the phone number on his collar, and stayed with him until his owner arrived. "I have two dogs myself which I rescued when I was younger," Mateo told CBS LA. Nobody was hurt. George, who started this by wandering toward traffic, recovered quickly.
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MOTIVATIONAL • Upworthy
A single man Googled how to foster. He became a dad.Stacy Barr Googled how to become a foster parent one day in 2018, a single adult acting on a desire to be a father that had been sitting with him for a decade. His first placement arrived on April 6 that year. Dakota was 14, had been in one home before, and showed up at Barr's house knowing nothing about the man inside it, including the fact that it was a single-parent home. "He was scared, I was scared, but it was as comfortable as it could be," Barr told Upworthy. Fostering became adoption, and on November 30, 2020, Barr officially became Dakota's dad. The judge teared up and said teen cases were his favorite. Dakota chose to take Barr's last name. He is now a college graduate, a milestone only 8% to 12% of foster youth reach by their late twenties. "A lot of people say he got lucky with me," Barr said. "He saved me in a lot of ways."
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MOTIVATIONAL • Sunny Skyz
A goalkeeper cried for his mom. The world got her there.Ana Candida Evora got her first passport at age 40-plus and flew more than 24 hours from Cape Verde to Miami last week, all to watch her son play goalkeeper at the World Cup. "I didn't even have a passport. It is the first time I have left Cabo Verde," she said. Days earlier, the trip looked impossible, with visa problems and costs standing in the way. Then her son, the goalkeeper Vozinha, spoke through tears after a match against Spain, wishing his late grandparents could see him and hoping his mother's visa would clear in time. The plea went viral. The U.S. State Department, FIFA and Cape Verde's football federation worked to get Evora to Miami, where officials and volunteers met her at the airport. Vozinha's Instagram following has since jumped from about 50,000 to more than 15 million. His mother was watching from the stands, which was the part she had actually wanted.
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NATURE • GreaterGood
A sea once emptied by whaling is loud againPhotographers Chris and Monique Fallows counted 304 humpback whales feeding near Dassen Island off South Africa's west coast in a single day, one of the largest such gatherings ever documented. The whales had packed into dense feeding clusters that scientists call super-groups, defined as at least 20 humpbacks crowded together at once. The behavior surprised researchers, who long assumed humpbacks travel alone or in pairs. Cold currents in the Southern Benguela push nutrients to the surface, drawing krill, which draws the whales. Scientists first recorded these crowds during research cruises in 2011. A 2025 study found 239 separate super-group sightings between 2015 and 2022. Many of the whales in the Fallows images had never been identified before, catalogued by the patterns on their flukes, which work like fingerprints. The species was nearly erased by commercial whaling. A sea once emptied by harpoons is loud again with whale breath.
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SCIENCE • Optimist Daily
69 percent of strangers cooperated when no one was watchingMore than 100,000 people across 125 countries faced the same quiet test, and 69 percent of them cooperated with a stranger they would never meet. The study, led by a German team and published in Science, paired each participant with an anonymous person from their own country. One option guaranteed $100. The other paid only $70, but if both people independently chose it, $400 went toward climate action. Most accepted the $30 loss on the bet that a stranger would do the same. Then came the second question: how many of your fellow citizens would cooperate? The average guess was 47 percent. That 22-point gap between what people did and what they expected of everyone else showed up in 124 of the 125 countries surveyed. Lead author Armin Falk at the University of Bonn put it plainly. "If we were less pessimistic and therefore more realistic, we could live in a better world." Most people already cooperate. They just assume their neighbors won't.
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With love, The Editor
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