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Friday, Oct 30 · Five good things · Three minutes
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KINDNESS • Reader's Digest
Fourteen firefighters climbed 925 feet to save two pilotsThe crash site was 925 feet up. Nobody had climbed half that high.
A hot-air balloon struck the tallest communications tower in Longview, Texas, on Saturday, Feb. 28, leaving two pilots dangling 925 feet above the ground. Rick James, 73, and Megan Reynolds, 38, had launched at 7 a.m. for an hour of gentle flying when a 24 mph gust pushed them into the tower. The basket caught on a guy wire. Below them, one cable after another snapped. Fourteen firefighters from the Longview Fire Department climbed to reach them, higher than any of them had ever gone. Cliff Patrick stopped every 50 or 60 feet to shake out his forearms. Partway up, his friend Lt. Stephen Winchell called down, "Have I ever told you I don't love heights?" He meant it. The crew hauled James and Reynolds across to the tower on ropes, then lowered them by hand, a couple hundred feet at a time. The rescue took nearly three hours. The firefighters gave up their own helmets to protect the pilots.
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KINDNESS • Sunny Skyz
They buy his corn daily. So they sheltered his cart.He said the cart wouldn't fit. The manager said otherwise.
When a storm hit Phoenix with fierce winds and hail, employees at a PNC Bank on Peoria Avenue refused to let a regular customer wait it out. Hilario Cruz Cruz has spent years selling elotes, the Mexican street corn dish, and fresh fruit along that stretch of road. The bank staff, who buy from him often, decided his cart was coming inside. Cruz Cruz was not convinced it would fit through the door. The manager was. "They said, 'He's not going anywhere else, he stays here, and we're bringing the cart inside,'" Cruz Cruz recalled through a translator. "I said, 'It won't fit,' but the manager said, 'I know it will.'" He held the door against the wind with one hand and pulled with the other while a young employee pushed from his side. The cart fit. Video of the moment has been viewed more than a million times on TikTok. Cruz Cruz was back on his usual route a week later.
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KINDNESS • Good News Network
Students rebuilt a wrecked car. A Navy veteran got the keys.He had been walking everywhere for food. Then the students finished.
A US Navy veteran in Minneapolis who went more than two years without a car now has a refurbished 2020 Hyundai Elantra, rebuilt by students at Dunwoody College of Engineering. Robert Hanson, who flew as a Navy airman from 1993 to 1997, lives with severe asthma and fibromyalgia that make public transit hard. He had been walking to get food. A Hennepin County welfare service referred him to the Recycled Rides for Schools program, run through the National Auto Body Council. The Elantra came from Allstate, which recovered it after a collision that took out a good portion of its front end. Students in the college's Automotive Collision and Refinishing program spent months on the body work before meeting the man it was for. "I'm just blown away and so thankful to everybody involved," Hanson said. He called it a game changer, mostly because he can finally buy groceries in bulk. Read the full story → | |||
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MEDICINE • ScienceDaily Health
Daylight lowered dementia risk for 87,000 adultsThe brightness that seemed to matter most was not much. An overcast day will do.
A study of 87,577 adults found that people who got more bright daylight during the day had a lower risk of developing dementia, with researchers pointing to one quietly alarming threshold. Getting less than 42 minutes of bright daytime light a day was a stronger predictor of dementia than six established risk factors. The participants wore wrist devices with accelerometers that measured their light exposure around the clock. Over a median follow-up of 8.1 years, 741 of them developed dementia. People exposed to average daytime light above 1,000 lux, roughly an overcast day outdoors, had a 16% lower risk, and longer stretches in brighter light lowered it further. Nighttime light showed no significant link. "Daytime light exposure may serve as a novel indicator of dementia risk," said corresponding author Hongliang Feng of Guangzhou Medical University. The study, published in General Psychiatry, cannot prove daylight prevents dementia. An overcast walk, it turns out, still counts. Read the full story → | |||
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SCIENCE • Upworthy
A 17-year-old intern found a planet orbiting two sunsHe had been on the job for three days. Then the timing was wrong.
Wolf Cukier was 17 and three days into a summer internship at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in 2019 when he found a planet orbiting two suns. His job was to dig through brightness data from NASA's TESS satellite, looking for anything odd. Something was. He first took it for a stellar eclipse in a distant system called TOI 1338. "But the timing was wrong," Cukier said, per NASA. It was a new planet, about 6.9 times the size of Earth, sitting roughly 1,300 light-years away in the constellation Pictor. Now named TOI 1338 b, though some call it Wolftopia after its finder, it circles two stars at once. Cukier landed as a co-author in The Astronomical Journal, among the youngest ever on a NASA discovery. In September 2026, the James Webb Space Telescope turned toward the planet to read its atmosphere. Cukier is now a PhD student at the University of Chicago, still at it. Read the full story → | |||
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