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Five good things · Three minutes
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KINDNESS • Sunny Skyz
Divers found the lost fisherman alive after 15 daysThe search had become a recovery. Then someone answered back.
A fisherman lost inside an unmapped underwater cave in southeastern Mexico was found alive 15 days after he vanished, pulled out by cave divers who kept searching long after the mission had turned into a recovery effort. Erasto Crisanto Valdez, 31, entered a cenote near San Francisco La Paz in Veracruz on July 23 while fishing with his father and became lost in a passage with visibility of less than a meter. Navy divers and local residents searched for more than a week without success. Then Harry Gust joined with fellow diver Rosalino Rivera. On his first day Gust found a spare air tank roughly 100 meters in. On the second, about 30 minutes into the dive, he found a dry chamber and called into the dark. "Yes!" came the answer. Valdez had been drinking cave water and praying, losing all sense of time. "Those 15 days felt like only three days to me," he said. Rivera shared his diving cylinder to bring Valdez back through the flooded passage. He is recovering in hospital with his family. Read the full story → | |||
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KINDNESS • Good News Network
Zion is the first park with a free all-terrain wheelchairOne chair. First come, first served. A mother saw it and cried.
Zion National Park is now the first in the U.S. national park system to offer an all-terrain wheelchair, free to any visitor who wants to reach the canyon trails. The chair arrived in July of last year, purchased with donated funds through a nonprofit called 2Live4 and built by the manufacturer Extreme Motus. Co-founder Ryan Grassley spent seven years developing the model while taking a friend with cerebral palsy, Sam, to nearly every national park property in Utah. Grassley remembers the delivery day best. "We were standing in front of the visitor center and telling the rangers how to use the chair, and a family walked by," he told KSL. "They had a child that used a wheelchair, and the mom was like, 'What is happening right now?'" Then she started crying. There is only one chair, available first come, first served. It has already outlasted every excuse. Read the full story → | |||
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NATURE • GreaterGood
A blind cat gave blood and saved a dying kittenHe can't see a thing. His blood saved a kitten anyway.
A blind ginger cat named Carrots donated 10ml of blood at Bradford Cat Watch Rescue & Sanctuary this month, saving a kitten who had arrived dehydrated and near death from life-threatening anemia. The kitten, Dandelion, received the transfusion and slowly began to recover. Three weeks on, his PCV level, a measure of red blood cells, has climbed to 30, well within the normal range for a healthy cat. Dandelion drew an outpouring of support from the shelter's followers, along with flowers. Carrots, who did the actual bleeding, noticed the imbalance. The sanctuary posted a message in his voice. "Yes it's great that his PCV is now 30, and yep the vet did an ok job .... I suppose... buuuutttt..... non of this would have been possible without me," it read. Staff took the point. Carrots has since received a medal and a large bag of treats. Read the full story → | |||
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NATURE • Reasons to be Cheerful
44 women learned to dive and rebuilt a dying reefPeople asked if women would even sign up. Over 150 applied.
A nonprofit called Coral Catch has trained 44 women from across Indonesia to restore coral reefs off Gili Air, a tiny island in the Gili archipelago known for its marine life. Founded by Rose Huizenga, a Dutch woman who arrived on sabbatical and never left, the nine-week scholarship teaches local women to build reef structures from bent steel, tend coral nurseries and monitor them year after year. The idea was met with early skepticism about whether women in a predominantly Muslim country would trade hijabs for wetsuits. Over 150 applied to the first cohort. Since 2021, mentees have planted more than 5,000 coral fragments across over 300 restoration structures. In 2025, researchers documented coral spawning from seven species, a first for the islands. Every graduate remains active in conservation work, an unusually high retention rate. Gabriela Nathania H, now studying in Queensland, has a colony of hex domes named after her. "I want to see how my baby corals are doing," she says.
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SCIENCE • Nice News
Dental experts built a tiny toucan a brand-new beakA beak, color-matched. So the other birds wouldn't notice.
Beauregard, a green aracari at Alabama's Birmingham Zoo, damaged his upper beak at 3 months old and lost part of his upper mandible. To fix it, the zoo called maxillofacial prosthetic experts at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Dentistry, who took an impression and built a mold, the way they would for human dental implants. They color-matched the prosthesis to a natural aracari beak, partly to spare him any social awkwardness among his fellow birds. At about 11 months old, per the university, he is eating and flying like any bird of his kind. He is one of a growing number of animals fitted with custom prostheses. A box turtle named Moses got a 3D-printed wheelchair from a Mississippi Aquarium aquarist during his first week on the job. Vasi became the first known sloth bear to wear a custom paw in 2025. "It's not limiting him at all," said Derrick Campana, who designed it. Read the full story → | |||
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One more thing — I’m putting together a small wall of reader notes for the website. If honeyletter has changed your mornings, hit reply and tell me. Say if I can quote you, first name and state.
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With love, The Editor
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