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Five good things · Three minutes
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PROGRESS • Good News Network
A squadron of new drone pilots saved every flood victimTheir training wasn't finished. The river didn't wait.
A district in northern Mozambique survived one of its worst floods in decades this January without a single recorded death, and a squadron of drones is the reason why. After weeks of rain, the Incomáti River burst its banks in Marracuene, submerging hundreds of square miles. Drone pilots trained through the African Development Bank's KOAFEC program flew overhead, locating stranded families and streaming live imagery to rescue teams who had no other way to see what the water had done. The timing was tight. The floods hit halfway through the pilots' course, eight months before their training was set to finish. "Before this project, I had absolutely no experience with drones," said Kátia Manjate, one of the new pilots. LiDAR imagery measured how deep each brown pool ran and guided rescue vehicles through door-high water. Of the 30 pilots who graduated in August, 10 left licensed to train the next batch themselves. Read the full story → | |||
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NATURE • Sunny Skyz
An overpass cut deer collisions 91 percentOne deer hit a day. Then they built a way across.
North America's largest wildlife overpass has cut animal-vehicle collisions along one stretch of Interstate 25 in Colorado by 91% since it opened in December. The 209-by-200-foot bridge sits near the Greenland exit between Larkspur and Monument, on a road where about one deer was hit each day during peak spring and fall migration. "Based on the video feed that we're collecting, huge success," said Chuck Attardo, an environmental manager with the Colorado Department of Transportation. He has watched elk herds cross, and pronghorn reaching the west side of the highway for the first time in decades. The project also includes five underpasses and fencing to guide animals toward the crossings. Biologists arranged logs along part of the bridge so smaller creatures, including the federally threatened Preble's meadow jumping mouse, have shelter from predators. For wildlife biologist Brandon Marette, six years of planning came down to one photo. "That elk with her calf was just standing there in safety, getting to the other side of I-25."
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KINDNESS • Upworthy
She passed a notebook. The whole plane wrote a story.A breakup, a notebook, and thirty strangers who had nowhere to be.
Robin Gelfenbien was 46, freshly out of the longest relationship of her life, and stuck on American Airlines Flight 4449 feeling, in her words, "disconnected and alone." Everyone around her was on their phone. So she opened a notebook, wrote "Let's create a story together!" and nervously asked the man next to her if he wanted to start. He did. The notebook then traveled the length of the plane, and she didn't see it again for an hour and a half. What came back was a group tale about a woman hunting for the best meatball sub in America, who falls for a Martian named XVIST with blue blood and a cure for every disease on Earth. Gelfenbien read the whole thing aloud over the plane's PA system. Passengers stopped her in the aisle, giddy to point out the lines they had written. One told her, "You restored my faith in humanity." She thought they had it backwards. Read the full story → | |||
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DELIGHT • Nice News
She smears peanut butter and the squirrels do the posingShe just wanted to relax after work. The squirrels had other plans.
Nancy Rose, a 72-year-old retired high school guidance counselor in Nova Scotia, has spent more than 15 years photographing American red squirrels in tiny handmade scenes. The critters drink tea, run a pizza shop, and eat poutine in a cafe, all posed with miniature props she builds from reused materials and donations from her community. She works up to 12 hours a day on the sets, then waits by her window for the squirrels to find the snacks she has placed. Peanut butter, smeared on props she wants them to hold, does most of the negotiating. None of the images are edited. The pizza shot took 500 attempts before a squirrel finally held the paddle correctly. Her series, The Secret Life of Squirrels, now spans children's books and calendars, and the hobby brings in about $50,000 a year. She had no idea it would make money. She kept doing it because it made her laugh. Read the full story → | |||
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MEDICINE • Good News Network
A routine heart test can now catch disease earlyThe test has existed for decades. Now it can see more.
A new AI tool developed in the UK can spot early signs of two common forms of heart disease from a standard electrocardiogram, potentially cutting the months-long wait many patients face for further testing. Details were presented this week at the European Society of Cardiology's annual congress in Munich. Trained on millions of patients, the model reads the ECG, a test that measures the heart's electrical activity and has never been able to detect heart disease on its own. In a trial of 67,000 patients in the US, it flagged 81% of heart failure cases and 90% of heart valve disease cases. The first outward sign of heart failure, for anyone who is not an experienced cardiologist, is often cardiac arrest. "When it comes to the heart, earlier diagnosis and treatment saves and improves lives," said Dr. Sonya Babu-Narayan of the British Heart Foundation, which funded the work. Roughly a billion ECGs are ordered worldwide every year. The machine reads them in the blink of an eye. Read the full story → | |||
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With love, The Editor
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