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Five good things · Three minutes
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KINDNESS • Upworthy
He asked ChatGPT for his birth mother. Minutes later, her name.He wouldn't do a DNA test. He tried a chatbot instead.
Avtar Singh spent two decades searching for his birth mother with almost nothing to go on. He had a first name, Savinder, and a nickname his grandmother once gave him, Titu. He would not do a DNA test, having spent his career as a chartered accountant. "They can sell it," he told The Guardian. "If they see something in my DNA, that affects my kids." Awake early in the south of France on May 8, after finishing cancer treatment, he tried ChatGPT instead. He fed it guesses: a woman roughly 87 to 97, likely given the middle name Kaur, connected to India, Africa and the U.K. Minutes later it returned Savinder Kaur Nagi, born 1936 in Kisumu, Kenya, and cited a tribute written by a London jewelry designer, Nicci Dhamu, about a mother who died in December 2024. Nicci had searched two years with no name. "No one's going to call themselves Titu on LinkedIn, are they?" she said. When they spoke, she asked, "Titu, is that you?" Both started crying. He was in London within days. Neither wants a DNA test to confirm it.
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MEDICINE • Optimist Daily
New blood test thresholds will catch heart attacks women once missedOne blood test, set to one level. It was missing women.
The world's four leading cardiovascular organizations agreed on a single universal definition of a heart attack for the first time, and two of the changes matter most for women. The announcement came at the European Society of Cardiology congress in Munich, with the guidelines published in the European Heart Journal. Emergency departments will now use sex-specific thresholds on the troponin blood test, the main diagnostic tool worldwide, which had been set to one level that catches all men having a heart attack but misses some women. Three heart attack types up to ten times more common in women, including spontaneous coronary artery dissection, were upgraded to the same priority tier as the clot-caused kind most people picture. Prof. Nicholas Mills of the University of Edinburgh, who led the task force, called the old threshold an "unintended systematic bias against women." Getting four organizations onto one document, he noted, was its own challenge. Read the full story → | |||
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DELIGHT • Upworthy
He came to play for them. A 100-year-old stole the show.He asked the band to play blues. Then he opened his case.
A band was playing a senior facility recently when a resident said to be 100 years old, wearing a Hawaiian shirt, asked the visiting musician for some blues in the key of C. The musician, a Lithuanian-born performer known as DØVYDÅS, said he could do that. The man replied that he would play some too, then opened his instrument case to reveal a flute. DØVYDÅS offered a few tempos, and the man settled on a steady four-note loop before launching into jazzy riffs. Soon other residents were up dancing and another man came forward to sing. Flute players in the comments were quick to note his technique. "His technique and ability are so obviously experienced and talented. Keeps that pinky down!" one wrote. Another comment read simply, "Us old folks still have value. This was wonderful." DØVYDÅS had come to play for the room. The man in the Hawaiian shirt had other plans.
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KINDNESS • Upworthy
Seven years, 300 benches, and finally his perfect 10Seven years of near-misses. Then he married someone on it.
Sam Wilmot has rated more than 300 benches since 2019, scoring them on back support, building material, and the view, and in seven years he never once awarded a perfect 10. His highest mark, a 9, went to a bench outside the 13th-century St. John the Baptist Church in Old Sodbury, South Gloucestershire, with a wooden seat and a view stretching toward Bristol and Wales. Close, he decided, but not quite the overwhelming joy a 10 required. Then on June 21, 2026, that same bench earned it. Wilmot married his fiancee, Sophie, on it. Their first-ever conversation, fittingly, had been bench-related, when she told him he was doing a "cracking" job. He credits her with the page existing at all. "No moment or bench will ever come close to this for me," the 29-year-old wrote. "I can proudly say I have found my 10. In Sophie, and this bench." The bench's installers left a comment. They put it there in memory of a father who, they wrote, would have been amused and delighted.
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NATURE • Reasons to be Cheerful
52,000 people are replacing their lawns to feed wildlifeHe spent $100 in 26 years. The moths noticed.
Doug Tallamy has spent about $100 turning his 10-acre Pennsylvania farm into a haven for wildlife over 26 years, mostly by pulling out invasive plants and dropping native seeds into the ground. He has since documented more than 1,380 species of moths there, along with 62 breeding bird species. When he and his wife Cindy bought the 300-year-old property in 2000, it looked green but held almost nothing. "There were no caterpillars," the University of Delaware entomologist recalls. That absence launched a movement. His nonprofit, Homegrown National Park, asks people to replace lawns with native habitat and register it on a national map. More than 52,000 participants have signed up, tending over 187,000 acres. His math is deliberately audacious: if just 10 to 20 percent of landowners planted natives, the result would top ten Yellowstones. He tours the country giving talks, and someone in the crowd has usually been dragged in by their neighbor.
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THE HONEYMAP
Sweet news is everywhere, if you know where to look.
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With love, The Editor
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