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Five good things · Three minutes
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KINDNESS • Sunny Skyz
A stranger filmed their proposal, then found them onlineShe filmed their proposal. Then she had to find them.
Daniel Sanchez proposed to Blanca Carcamo at Point Mugu State Beach in Malibu as the sun broke through the clouds, a moment he had been waiting for. "If there's not a better moment, it's now," he recalled thinking. Carcamo had been waiting too. She joked she'd spent years in what she called "engagement purgatory." What neither of them knew was that a stranger was filming the whole thing from above the beach. Brandee Evans had spotted Carcamo's father hiding behind her car, peeking out to watch his daughter get engaged. She stayed to record it, then realized she had no way to reach the couple. So she posted the footage online and asked the internet to find them. It worked. The video reached nearly 3 million views and, eventually, Sanchez and Carcamo, who got back a memory they had never seen from the outside. They invited Evans to the wedding. She accepted, with or without a plus-one. Read the full story → | ||||||||||
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NATURE • Smithsonian Magazine
Scientists are vaccinating albatrosses by hand to beat bird fluThe birds won't sit still for a shot. These ones will.
Wildlife biologists on a remote Tasmanian island have started catching shy albatrosses by hand to vaccinate them against the H5N1 bird flu, one bird at a time. The pilot project on Albatross Island aims to give two doses each to up to 100 birds, who are then marked with nontoxic paint and tracked by remote camera. It is slow work. Teams in head-to-toe hazmat suits pick up each albatross, weigh it, administer a shot and leave a numbered marker at its nest. Most wild birds are far too mobile to recapture for a second dose, but nesting albatrosses stay put, offering what environment minister Guy Barnett called a "unique opportunity." The albatrosses remain healthy so far. Tasmania recorded its first bird flu case in August, and detections have since risen to 50 events. An estimated 15,000 breeding pairs live across three windswept islets in the Bass Strait, and officials would rather not wait to find out how vulnerable they are. Read the full story → | ||||||||||
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MOTIVATIONAL • Nice News
She ran 5K in 20 minutes at age eightShe already holds the record. Now she wants to beat herself.
Lily Janmohamed, a 10-year-old from Stanmore, England, will try to break her own 5K record at the Battersea Park Run in London on Oct. 17. She is aiming for 19 minutes, 25 seconds. Last year, at age 8, she ran 3.1 miles in 20 minutes, 16 seconds, the fastest time recorded for her age. She has since cut it to 19 minutes, 45 seconds. Guinness World Records does not track 5K times for 9-year-olds, so the achievement sits in a quiet statistical gap, unofficial but real. She trains three times a week and is raising money for Scope, a charity that supports young people with disabilities. "My record will be hard to beat but I'm up for the challenge," she said. Her father, Faizal, said running has given her confidence. If the weather turns bad on Saturday, Lily has a backup plan. She will simply try again on Oct. 31. Read the full story → | ||||||||||
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PROGRESS • Optimist Daily
Those daily-tested speakers now warn of quakes seconds earlyPhone networks fail in a quake. The call to prayer doesn't.
Indonesia is testing whether the loudspeakers that broadcast the call to prayer five times a day can double as earthquake alarms. A five-year pilot running until 2030, led by Japanese and Indonesian researchers, connects mosque speakers to a seismic sensor network that sounds an alert seconds before the shaking arrives. Several mosques are already wired in. The idea came from Dr. Inoue Hiroshi of Kyoto University's Disaster Prevention Research Institute, who studied a 2009 Sumatra earthquake that killed at least 1,000 people. Phone networks fail in quakes. Mosque speakers, he notes, hold up because the people who rely on them test them daily. "The advantage of a mosque speaker is that they're existing and well maintained," he told the Guardian. A village 31 miles from the epicenter might get only five to ten seconds of warning. The team is still working out how to spend them.
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DELIGHT • Reasons to be Cheerful
Swipe your card, and the library stays open after closingClosed all day. The doors still opened.
The Wyoming, Minnesota branch of the East Central Regional Library now lets cardholders in after staff have gone home, part of a growing effort to keep rural libraries useful when their hours are shrinking. Users swipe a library card to unlock the doors, sign a form, and sit through a short presentation covering the defibrillator and emergency exits. So far, 55 people have registered and used the building more than 800 times this year. Usage has grown 66 percent since April. For Ryan Stigile, a local pastor, the appeal is simple. The town has no coffee shops. "It's this or McDonald's," he said while working on his laptop in the evening. Michael Sayen, who was finishing a novel the day after Labor Day, uses it to file court documents and cool off on hot afternoons. Similar programs run from Utah to western Washington. Staffed hours have not been cut. The building just stays open later, for anyone with a card.
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With love, The Editor
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