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Five good things · Three minutes
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MEDICINE • Good News Network
A twice-daily pill doubled pancreatic cancer survivalFor years the protein was called untargetable. Then a pill grabbed it.
Pancreatic cancer patients whose chemotherapy has failed now have a twice-daily pill that doubled their survival in a phase 3 trial, from seven months to more than 13. The drug, daraxonrasib, won FDA approval after a 35-day review and is largely covered by insurance. Made by Revolution Medicine, it targets a protein called KRAS, long thought untargetable because of its smooth surface. When the results were presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in Chicago in May, some physicians stood and applauded with tears in their eyes. "I have not seen anything like that before in trials we have run in pancreatic cancer," said Dr. Brian Wolpin of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, who led the study. "I just kept repeating, 'Wow.'" One man in his 70s, who joined the trial in 2022 after his cancer spread to his lymph nodes, now shows no visible tumors on scans. The same KRAS approach is being tested in colon and lung cancers.
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KINDNESS • Sunny Skyz
Landfill workers spotted the cat trapped 15 feet upHe missed dinner. He turned up at the landfill.
Mike, an 8-year-old domestic short hair, missed dinner one evening and did not come back. His owner, Neal Augenstein, spent two days walking the neighborhood with a bag of treats, calling his name, checking even near the sewers. Then he remembered the family had recently thrown out three old couches. "I was having a sinking feeling that the cat was in the couch," he said. He was right. By then the couch had been hauled to a landfill, and Mike was somewhere inside it. Mauricio Martinez, a heavy equipment operator, spotted a frightened cat stranded on a ledge about 15 feet up in the trash pit. Workers eased a loader bucket beneath him and coaxed him aboard, which took about 10 minutes. Then Mike, freshly saved, bolted through a tunnel into a storage room and had to be rescued a second time. Animal control finally caught him and reunited him with Augenstein at a nearby shelter. Read the full story → | |||
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MOTIVATIONAL • Good News Network
Born without arms, he just signed his first racing contractHe sent one bold email. They wrote back.
Callum Smith, 23, has signed his first driver contract with Team BRIT, the world's only competitive racing team made up entirely of disabled drivers. Smith was born without arms and steers with his feet, hitting more than 110 mph on track. His left foot turns a flat steering plate while his right works the accelerator and brake. A switch above the pedal handles the horn and headlights. "My feet are like my hands," Smith said. "I write with my right foot, I play guitar with my feet, and I eat by myself use a normal knife and fork." The racing dream began with an email he sent to Team BRIT, offering lifelong gratitude if they were interested. They wrote back. He passed the tests. Smith clocked his first 90 mph run at Donington Park in July 2025, then 100 mph at Silverstone in his own Audi A3. Le Mans is next on his list. Read the full story → | |||
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DELIGHT • Upworthy
At 96 and legally blind, she's painting her best workThe world told her to take it easy. She declined.
Alice McGinty is 96, legally blind, and painting some of the best work of her life. She lives in Ohio, where she does resistance training three times a week, meditates daily, and posts videos on Instagram arguing that the years from 75 to 100 are the most important a person gets. "I feel this part of my life has been the most important of all," she says. "That we can do almost everything we did and even better." Macular degeneration took her fine vision, but not her sense of color. Now she paints in bright neons, landscapes and florals, with someone handing her the tubes. "Her last art show was some of her best work," says her collaborator, Anne Hartnett. McGinty offers herself to research trials studying healthy 96-year-olds. Scientists keep declining, on the grounds that she will not be around long enough to follow. She has had two art shows since the diagnosis, and she is planning her next trip. Read the full story → | |||
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DELIGHT • Nice News
He carves lifelike animals with a chainsaw for a chiselHis mother asked for a wooden mushroom. Thirty years later, he's still carving.
Simon Bogg carves lifelike wooden animals using a chainsaw as his chisel, freestyling each piece with no plan beyond a source image for the trickier ones. The 53-year-old from Lincolnshire, England, sells commissions across the U.K. full time, and can spend three days working eight-hour shifts on his most intricate work. His most popular creation is the carved owl, small and priced around $200 and up. His largest stood 22 feet tall. It started with a mushroom. Bogg was in the building trade when his mother asked him to make one from wood, so he borrowed her chainsaw and spent a Sunday afternoon on it. "A week later she rang and said, 'I've got five orders for you, they love it,'" he told SWNS. Her friends, presumably. He is entirely self-taught. The biggest risk of the work, he says, is not the blade. "Deafness, vibrations, and chopping bits off is a big risk. But the biggest one is fatigue." Read the full story → | |||
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THE HONEYMAP
Sweet news is everywhere, if you know where to look.
• Every good thing we have reported, pinned where it happened •
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With love, The Editor
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