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Five good things · Three minutes
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MEDICINE • Woman's World
She's five years cancer-free, and 300 gamers made it happenThe gamers usually raised money for strangers. Then it got personal.
A video gaming community in Portland, Oregon, has raised more than $1 million for cancer research after one of their own was diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer. Jessica Conwell got the diagnosis after her husband, Matt, spotted a box of tissues in the consulting room and correctly guessed the news. Matt runs PDXLAN, which hosts marathon parties where 300 or more gamers compete from Thursday to Sunday evening, with sleep breaks to recharge. Jessica was always there helping, which is why the gamers call her "conference mom." Her treatment included a double mastectomy, chemo and a bout of sepsis. The group had long raised money for charity, but after her diagnosis they redirected it. The first session brought in a record $55,000, tallied on a digital toteboard that ticked up with each donation. Jessica is now closing in on five years cancer-free. "I never knew how many people were in my corner," she says. "I was never alone." Read the full story → | ||||||||||
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NATURE • Good News Network
Dying corals fully recovered in seven weeks by touchingTwo fragments tipped over in a tank. One was dying. It stopped.
Bleached corals on the brink of death fully recovered in seven weeks at a Stanford University lab, the fastest documented recovery on record. The method, published in Science Advances, is almost embarrassingly simple. You put a dying coral next to a healthy clone and let them touch. Where they made contact, color returned, signaling that beneficial algae had flowed back in. The discovery started by accident. In 2025, Professor Steve Palumbi noticed two fragments from the same colony had tipped over in a tank and were now leaning against each other. Lead author Danny Collins, a PhD student at the Doerr School of Sustainability, tested it properly by arranging pairs millimeters apart. The touching ones recovered. The others died. Once inside, the algae doubled every four days, about ten times the rate seen in wild corals. Bleached corals are often written off as a lost cause. Collins puts it plainly. They are not dead yet. Read the full story → | ||||||||||
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KINDNESS • Google News Human Interest
Lost 34 days in Yellowstone, Luna made it homeThe trap used no food. Just the family's scent.
Luna, a 10-year-old Jack Russell terrier who bolted from her family's cabin at Yellowstone National Park on Sept. 10, was caught and reunited with her owners on Wednesday, more than a month after she went missing. Katie Boucher, the volunteer who led the rescue and president of the Norris Ark Training and Recovery Center in Norris, Montana, set a live trap baited with scraps of a family T-shirt and pillowcase. She avoided food, which would have attracted the grizzlies and wolves that also call the park home. Luna had spent her first year on the streets before adoption, and it showed. She was spotted retracing her family's route, sneaking into lodges they had visited and slipping through automatic doors. "She's underweight, but that's to be expected. She's alert and in good spirits," Boucher said. "I was crying all the way up here from the park." It was the last week Boucher could have searched. Her seasonal RV park closes Monday.
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DELIGHT • Good News Network
At 99, she became the world's oldest wing-walkerHer niece saw it on the news. Then she made a call.
A 99-year-old woman named Helga Duffy was strapped to the top of a small plane at Rendcomb Airfield in Gloucestershire, England this week and became the world's oldest wing-walker, according to Guinness World Records. She broke a record set only three months earlier by a 97-year-old, Betty Bromage, after Duffy's niece saw the news and staff at her care facility urged her to try. "I had no idea what it was," Duffy said of the stunt. She has arthritis and a bad right knee, and she spent more than five minutes in the air anyway. A former nurse, she described the sensation at a thousand meters as unlike anything else. "I felt so good, I thought, 'is this like if you take drugs?' I'm sure it is." An adjudicator met her on the ground with a certificate. The flight raised over 1,600 pounds for the regional Air Ambulance charity. Bromage, meanwhile, says she plans to reclaim the title at 100.
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DELIGHT • Good News Network
Three firefighters, two officers, one kitten saved from the engineThey were out for cupcakes. Something was honking at them.
A high school teacher in Sandy Springs, Georgia, found a kitten in her car engine earlier this month, roughly a week before her Halloween wedding anniversary. Nicole and her husband, Brandon, were driving to pick up birthday cupcakes for her journalism students when another driver began honking and pointing at something hanging beneath the car. It was a black kitten, less than seven weeks old and weighing just over a pound, wedged into the suspension. The couple called for help rather than keep driving. It took three firefighters and two police officers to free the stowaway, who did not appear to want freeing. A vet checkup confirmed the kitten was healthy. Nicole and Brandon, married on Halloween, decided a black cat arriving in October was not an accident, and took him home. They named him Friday Shadow. "These wonderful first responders should get some recognition for going above and beyond to save such a tiny life," Nicole said.
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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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