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Five good things · Three minutes
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KINDNESS • Woman's World
An 11-year-old husky charged a bear to save a boyDad lunged for his son. The dog got there first.
Bella, an 11-year-old husky mix, charged a black bear in her family's Torrington, Connecticut, yard last week to protect a 6-year-old boy. Colton Tazzara was playing in the driveway with a Nerf gun when the bear emerged from the woods and headed toward him. His dad, Jeff, lunged for his son. Bella got there first. She rocketed across the yard and clamped down on the bear's haunch, which so confused the animal that it backed away, bumped into Jeff's boat, and bolted into the trees. Jeff scooped Colton to safety. When Tara Tazzara walked out to say she was ready, her family tried to explain. She rolled her eyes. "Surely you're exaggerating," she said. Then she pulled up the security footage. "Dear God," she murmured. "She is getting a lot of treats," Jeff declared. That night Bella slept in her usual spot, on the end of Colton's bed. Read the full story → | |||
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KINDNESS • Sunny Skyz
He climbed a mountain with no gear to reach himRescue teams couldn't reach him. Clark had no gear either.
Matthew Clark, 24, has been awarded a Carnegie Medal for climbing a British Columbia mountain without any gear to reach an injured hang-glider pilot. Clark had just finished his own flight over Mount Prevost, in the Cowichan Valley, when he heard on the radio that 75-year-old Stephen Parson had crashed into a tree and was hanging in his harness about 200 feet below the summit. Parson was semiconscious, with a concussion and a serious leg wound, and beginning to suffer suspension trauma. Rescue teams could not reach him. Clark, a rock climber with four years of free-soloing experience, went up anyway, bracing his body against the walls of a slippery gully. He cut Parson from the harness with a knife, treated the wound and kept him warm for about three hours until a helicopter arrived. "I was comfortable and in my element and I went for it," Clark said. Parson spent eight days in hospital, then made a full recovery. Read the full story → | |||
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PROGRESS • Good News Network
A teen from the Bronx funds 10 kids' education in GhanaMost seniors juggle prom and exams. He added a country.
Max Owobu, an 18-year-old high school senior from the Bronx, spent this year applying to universities and running an international nonprofit that pays for children in Ghana to attend school. He started it at 15, using money saved from his weekly allowance to send one boy, Matthew, to class. Owobu began visiting Ghana, his Nigerian father's childhood home, during summers, where he noticed kids his own age selling things on the street instead of studying. His Yenko Foundation, a registered 501(c)3, covers tuition, uniforms, meals and supplies. A quality education in Ghana usually means private school, and the system attracts scammers who charge parents hundreds of dollars for what Owobu calls little more than stern daycare. He and Matthew nearly got caught by one. A friend pointed him to Calvary Methodist School, and one visit settled it. The foundation has now funded 10 children through grades K-5, at $1,000 each per year.
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NATURE • Good News Network
The rarest monkey just got a 7,500-acre safe homeDown to 250 animals. Vietnam moved anyway.
Vietnam has established a 7,500-acre reserve in Ninh Binh Province to protect Delacour's langur, one of the world's most-endangered primates. The Kim Bang Delacour's Langur Habitat Conservation Area covers 3,182 hectares of karst limestone escarpments and forest across three wards, including Tam Chuc, whose UNESCO-listed rice fields and towering pinnacles draw visitors from around the world. Named after the French biologist who first identified it, the langur is down to roughly 250 individuals across perhaps 17 populations. It is not a species built for a comeback in a hurry. Females mature at about four, carry a single infant for seven months, and do not wean the baby until it is nearly two. About 4,400 acres of the reserve will be strictly guarded, with a further 3,500 acres set aside for ecological restoration. Authorities plan close monitoring of the slow-breeding monkey, alongside ecotourism tied to the area's natural heritage. Read the full story → | |||
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MEDICINE • MIT News
MIT made mRNA vaccines that no longer need cold storageFor months, nothing worked. Then they asked an algorithm.
MIT researchers have formulated RNA vaccines that stay stable at room temperature for up to a year, or at nearly 100 degrees Fahrenheit for two months, removing one of the biggest barriers to shipping them where cold-storage freezers do not exist. The work appears today in Nature Biotechnology. Standard mRNA vaccines have to be kept between -20 and -80 degrees Celsius. To get around that, the team tweaked the formulation around the lipid nanoparticles that carry the RNA, testing FDA-approved excipients with help from a machine-learning algorithm. For months, nothing worked. "It was really frustrating for the team," said Ana Jaklenec, a principal investigator at MIT's Koch Institute. The algorithm converged on a stable recipe in a handful of iterations rather than thousands of experiments. Mice given the heat-resistant Covid-19 vaccine, even after long storage, mounted an immune response equal to a Moderna-like shot. The same formulation also worked as a dissolving microneedle skin patch. The research was funded in part by the Gates Foundation. Read the full story → | |||
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With love, The Editor
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