Just the Good Bits ☀

Wednesday, November 11, 2026

Martin Luther King Jr.’s handwritten “I Have a Dream” draft resurfaces, volunteer musicians bring songs to veterans’ bedsides, googly-eyed buoys protect seabirds, an 85-year-old actor takes the stage with Alzheimer’s, and a famous wetland turns 80.

🌱 Good News

Martin Luther King Jr.’s handwritten final draft of “I Have a Dream” turns up in a desk drawer

Scholars long assumed the yellow notepad pages King wrote and revised until 4 a.m. the night before the 1963 March on Washington had been thrown away. Civil rights leader Xernona Clayton, now 96, found them decades ago in an envelope marked “speech” in her late husband’s desk, and he had been one of King’s aides. She kept them private out of respect, but decided it was time to share them, and Christie’s has confirmed the seven pages are the only known handwritten final draft. They head to auction in January, giving the world a rare look at King editing his words in real time.

Source: Smithsonian Magazine →

For Veterans Day: volunteer musicians bring songs to hospitalized veterans

Volunteers with the nonprofit Musicians On Call visit hospital rooms, including the hospice unit at the VA Medical Center in Washington, D.C., to play live music for patients and their families. On one visit, guitarist Dante Ciolfi, who teaches computer science by day, sang the Eagles’ “Desperado” for 93-year-old Army veteran Lawrence Ludden. Ludden clapped along afterward and shared that he used to sing on stage in light operas as a young man, a memory the volunteers had never heard.

Source: NPR →

Googly-eyed buoys and hawk-shaped kites are keeping seabirds out of fishing nets

Diving birds like guillemots and razorbills often drown after getting tangled in gillnets. In a large trial off Cornwall, England, ten fishers set more than 1,000 nets in pairs, one with a scare device and one without. Nets with kites shaped like birds of prey had 71% lower odds of catching seabirds, and nets with spinning big-eyed buoys had 59% lower odds, a result the lead researcher called genuinely encouraging.

Source: Mongabay →

An 85-year-old actor returns to the stage after an Alzheimer’s diagnosis

Peter Marinker was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s after struggling during rehearsals, but instead of retiring he took on the solo role of Krapp in Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, a play about memory and ageing. The London production supported him with an autocue, a prompt earpiece and extra rehearsal time, and wove in recordings of his own 1983 performance of the same role. The director said they staged it because of his diagnosis, not in spite of it, and the run raised money for the Alzheimer’s Society.

Source: Positive News →

A famous swan sanctuary turns 80 with a call to restore the world’s wetlands

In 1946, naturalist Peter Scott settled beside the marshes at Slimbridge in Gloucestershire to watch migrating swans and geese, and the reserve he built became the first of the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust’s sites. Scott went on to help save the Hawaiian nēnē goose, campaign against whaling and co-found WWF. For the 80th anniversary, the charity is calling for a million hectares of wetlands to be restored worldwide, noting that marshes and mangroves can soak up carbon far faster than forests while also easing floods and cleaning water.

Source: BBC News →

🔬 Tech & Science

Meet the “hell chicken,” the first dinosaur known to specialize in fruit

Researchers studying fossils from Montana and North Dakota have named a new turkey-sized dinosaur, Infernogallus jamesi, that lived about 66 million years ago. It had no teeth, but its unusual jaw muscles let it slide its beak back and forth, and ridges on the beak helped it mash soft foods much like some parrots do today. The study in Nature suggests dinosaurs ate a wider variety of foods than scientists thought, possibly including berries and stone fruits.

Source: BBC Newsround →

A student 3D-printed LEGO-style bricks from simulated moon dust

Moon dust has no organic matter to hold it together, so building with it usually needs added binders. A University of Arkansas undergraduate, working with engineer Wan Shou, used a laser 3D-printing method that fuses the grains of a lunar soil simulant directly to each other, then shaped them into cross- and H-shaped pieces that snap together. The bricks are still weaker and more porous than binder-based materials, but they show a promising path toward building lunar shelters from local materials.

Source: Popular Science →

Voyager 1 is about to be a full light-day from Earth, and NASA wants everyone to celebrate

Nearly 50 years after launch, Voyager 1 is still sending back science from interstellar space, and it is about to become so far away that its signals take a whole day to reach us. On November 17, NASA is inviting people around the world to flash Voyager’s call sign, VGR, in Morse code with their phones after sunset, creating a wave of light around the planet. A live discussion with the mission team follows on November 19.

Source: NASA →

Coventry Cathedral’s medieval stained glass, saved from the Blitz, goes online

Before German bombs destroyed Coventry Cathedral in 1940, its 15th-century stained glass was packed into 30 crates and hidden in a village cellar, but the windows were never put back together. Now conservators with the World Monuments Fund have photographed and cataloged about 12,000 fragments, Britain’s largest collection of loose medieval stained glass, and launched a free digital exhibition. The pieces include saints, fanciful beasts and portraits of the ordinary people who paid for the windows.