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Five good things · Three minutes
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MEDICINE • Good News Network
He can feel his dog's fur again after paralysisParalyzed since a pool dive. Now he can feel his dog.
Keith Thomas can scratch his nose again. For a man paralyzed from the chest down since 2020, that counts as an event. Thomas, from Massapequa, broke his neck diving into a pool during the summer of 2020. Three months later, the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research asked if he wanted to enroll in a three-year trial of what they call double neural bypass surgery. Electrodes implanted in his brain detect when he wants to move. Sensors in his fingers read what he is holding, then send that back up. He can now feel his dog's fur and adjust his grip for a ball or an egg. After 35 weeks of training, strength in his right arm has climbed 86 percent. The gains persist even when the computer is switched off. "For me this is an incredible moment," said Professor Chad Bouton, who led the team. The findings were published in Nature. Nobody knows how far he'll get.
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KINDNESS • Sunny Skyz
Randy trusted his gut, and a woman lived because of it.He drove past it once. Then he turned around.
Randy Gerlach was driving to work along a country road in Morrison, Illinois, when he spotted a car sitting in a ditch. The 16-year-old wasn't sure it was an accident. The driver might have just slipped off the shoulder. He kept going into town anyway, then thought better of it and turned around. "I turned around in town because I figured by then, if it was an accident and they didn't mean to, they would've been gone by then, and they weren't," Gerlach said. Inside the car he found a woman unconscious behind the wheel. He called 911, and responders rushed her to the hospital. Doctors later told him that if he had arrived 20 minutes later, she likely would not have survived. Gerlach does not think much of the word hero. "Just right place at the right time, and I actually did the right thing and didn't just keep going," he said. His advice: go with your gut.
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NATURE • Good Good Good
Twelve baby turtles took a wrong turn. Firefighters carried them home.They followed the wrong light. Someone lifted the grate.
Firefighters in Boca Raton, Florida, pulled a dozen loggerhead hatchlings out of a condominium storm drain last week after the baby turtles wandered off course on their way to the ocean. Newly hatched loggerheads follow moonlight and starlight toward the water. Artificial lighting from beachfront buildings can confuse them, and this batch ended up tumbling into a drain instead. Crews lifted a heavy metal grate and reached in to collect the hatchlings one at a time. Each turtle was smaller than a human palm. After the rescue, the firefighters handed the group over to wildlife officials, who released them back onto the beach at night, pointed the right way. Twelve turtles that took a wrong turn got a second attempt at the same short walk to the sea.
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KINDNESS • InspireMore
An 11-year-old read 100 hours to shelter animalsHe hit 100 hours. Then he did the math on 200.
Nehemiah Turner has read to shelter animals for 100 hours over two years, making him the first child in the history of the Jacksonville Humane Society's Pawsitive Reading program to reach the mark. The 11-year-old started when his grandmother brought him in to volunteer, drawn by a simple preference for dogs. "100 hours read here at the shelter is such an amazing accomplishment over two years. That's some serious, serious dedication for a young person like Nehemiah," CEO Lawrence Nicholas told Action News Jax. The program pairs kids with animals who need a calm voice, no tablets involved. "This is a place where we can put the tablet and the electronics down, pick up a good old-fashioned book, and read to somebody who really wants to hear your voice," Nicholas said. Nehemiah, a straight-A student heading into sixth grade, has already done the math on what comes after 100. He is aiming for 200.
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SCIENCE • Upworthy
His pocket forests grow ten times faster than plantations.The experts said it would never survive. The trees disagreed.
Akira Miyawaki, a Japanese botanist born in Okayama in 1928, spent his career asking a simple question: how would a forest grow if humans had never touched it? He found his answer in an unlikely place. Studying Japan's forests, he noticed that the most resilient ecosystems clustered around ancient Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples, dense and wild, nothing like the tidy rows of a plantation. So he copied them. Rather than spacing out mature trees, Miyawaki packed small native saplings and shrubs tightly together, often three to five plants per square meter. Forced to compete for light, they grew up to ten times faster and formed self-sustaining pocket forests. Experts doubted such crowding could survive without constant care. The forests kept growing anyway, improving soil and drawing in wildlife. Miyawaki died in 2021 at 93. His method is now used to restore damaged land in cities around the world.
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With love, The Editor
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