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Five good things · Three minutes
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KINDNESS • Good News Network
A stranger spent his inheritance on this boy's first grand pianoA tuner read about the boy. Then he opened his wallet.
Jude Kofie was 9 when he found an unused electric keyboard in his family's Colorado basement and put his hands on the keys for the first time. The autistic son of a Ghanaian immigrant, he turned out to be a natural, the kind of player local papers write about. That is how Bill Magnuson, a piano tuner in Aurora, first heard of him. He came to a talent show to see for himself. "He's beyond special," Magnuson told CBS News reporter Steve Hartman. "He's Mozart level. It's coming from somewhere beyond." Then a truck pulled up to the Kofie house. Magnuson had spent much of his family inheritance, about $15,000, on a brand new grand piano for a boy he barely knew. It came with lifetime tuning and professional lessons. "We are super thankful," said Jude's father, Isiah, wiping his eyes. Jude is 14 now, touring, with an album out called Introducing: Jude Kofie.
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MOTIVATIONAL • Upworthy
Quadriplegic for 20 years, he never stopped mowing lawnsHe broke his neck in a pool. He kept the mowers running.
Ben Medley has run his own lawn care business in Kentucky for nearly 25 years, and a diving accident in July 2005 did not stop him. Medley broke two vertebrae in his neck at a party at his parents' house, on his one-year wedding anniversary. He is now quadriplegic, without hand function. He kept mowing anyway. He built a custom Hoyer lift into the bed of his white pickup truck, a setup he compares to a hospital lift bolted onto his trailer. It moves him from the driver's seat into his wheelchair, then hoists him onto his mower. He uses it 15 times a day, working a remote by bending his wrist. Chase Stetson, who runs a lawn care account as That Lawn Dude, met Medley at a Mexican restaurant and posted the rig online. "It's a little bit slower than most people," Medley says of the process, "but it keeps me going."
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DELIGHT • Upworthy
She zoomed in and found her childhood dog, mid-pranceBecky Turner went looking on Google Maps Street View for an old photo of her sister riding a bike in the driveway. She never found it. Instead the archives surfaced a 2011 image of her yard, and when she zoomed in, there was Sonny, her childhood dog, mid-prance in the sunny front grass. Turner posted the clip to TikTok, where it has passed nine million views. "It was a new experience with him that I got to have, and that made it feel really special," she told People. "Even after death, I'm still discovering that he finds ways to tell me he is around." Thousands of commenters started searching the archives for their own people and pets. One found a husband gone eleven years, still standing in the driveway. Turner, a tattoo artist in New Haven, Connecticut, sometimes inks pet portraits for grieving clients. One viewer painted Sonny and asked permission afterward: "This was too nice not to paint." Read the full story → | |||
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DELIGHT • Upworthy
A 92-year-old's mining sandwich charmed 9 million followersNine million people came for the sandwich. They stayed for the grin.
A 92-year-old British TikTok creator known as Grandad Joe has drawn 9 million followers to a sandwich his generation carried down the mines. He starts with two slices of bread and an amount of butter that would concern a cardiologist. Then he empties a can of corned beef by poking a hole in one end and blowing the meat out in a single chunk. On top go hard-boiled eggs, pickled red onions, thick tomato slices, and a heavy layer of Branston pickle. The dish is a Miners' Mix, from the Northeast of England, the country's oldest intensive coal-mining region. The Backyard Chef, who recreated it on YouTube, noted the sandwiches were durable and affordable, and usually packed by wives or mothers as a connection to home. Commenters worried aloud about the miners' coworkers. Most just watched Grandad Joe grin up at the camera with every step, unbothered, spreading the butter he likes on the bread he likes.
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SCIENCE • Optimist Daily
This living fabric cleans itself and mends its own ripsIt repairs its own tears. It also knows when to stop.
A research team at the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology has grown a fabric from a living fungus that cleans itself and repairs its own tears. The material comes from Cordyceps militaris, a fungus used in traditional Chinese medicine that forms fine threadlike filaments. Researchers cultivated it into pellets, pressed those into flexible sheets, and added glycerol to keep them pliable. When the fabric rips, fresh pellets placed on the damaged spot grow new fibers. Before anyone pictures a dress quietly expanding on its hanger, Li Ke, the paper's first author, offered reassurance. "A living textile does not mean that the dress is constantly growing during normal use," he said. Under dry conditions the fungus goes dormant. The team made a prototype dress, though the culture medium accounts for more than 95 percent of production costs, so cotton is safe for now. Environmental testing found the fabric degraded fully within 41 days.
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With love, The Editor
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