Sunday, October 25, 2026
A quick-thinking bystander stops a runaway school bus, Arizona gets a new national park, a Ukrainian city keeps fixing things underground, and Van Gogh's Starry Night gets a new birthday.
Ebro Ahmed, 27, was on a break outside a St. Paul, Minnesota, shop when a middle school bus rolled past with its doors open and its driver in the middle of an apparent seizure. He sprinted after it, jumped aboard, and pulled the parking brake, then called police and stayed with the driver until paramedics arrived. He has no medical training and says he'd rather not even get the recognition.
Source: Good News Network →
Chiricahua, a national monument since 1924, has been upgraded to a national park. It protects towering rock spires left by a volcanic eruption some 27 million years ago, a meeting point of desert, grassland, and forest, and the homeland of the Chiricahua Apache. The area is also prized by hikers, climbers, and stargazers.
Source: Good News Network →
Chornomorsk, a Black Sea city at the heart of Ukraine's repair movement, lost the college building where it held repair cafés to a missile strike. Rather than cancel, organizers moved their festival underground, with demos on fixing bikes, electronics, and clothes, plus a zone where visitors can take everyday objects apart. One organizer says the point is to keep young people learning, creating, and imagining their future despite the war.
Source: Positive News →
Across the US, students and other young people are creating and running their own low-cost housing for classmates who've lost a place to live. At UC Davis, the student-run Aggie House gave one first-year student a stable home for nine months after a family conflict left him with nowhere to go. Beyond a roof, these spaces give residents a real sense of belonging during a shaky stage of life.
Source: Reasons to be Cheerful →
London's Natural History Museum received a record 65,403 entries from 121 countries for this year's competition, now in its 62nd year. Italian photographer Federico Veronesi won the top prize with a moving image of elephant behavior in Namibia, and the youth title went to Oscar Whitfield for a close-up of a hardworking dung beetle. The contest aims to show the beauty of nature and why it's worth protecting.
Source: Positive News →
A Korean research team compared The Starry Night with historical sky positions and found it best matches the pre-dawn view from Van Gogh's room in Saint-Rémy around July 22, 1889, with a crescent moon, Venus, and the Hyades star cluster. That's about a month later than the painting's traditional date. They cross-checked the artist's letters, weather records, and even his mentions of cicadas to back it up.
Source: Good News Network →
ETH Zurich scientists studied half a gram of the material NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission brought back from asteroid Bennu in 2023. Isotope fingerprints of iron, titanium, and chromium challenge earlier ideas about where Bennu formed and suggest Jupiter played a big role in mixing the building blocks of planets 4.5 billion years ago.
Source: ScienceDaily →
Engineers coated two gel fins with a layer of light-sensitive muscle cells thinner than a hair. Shining light on either fin makes it flap, letting the team steer the tiny robot through a simple underwater maze at about four body lengths per minute. It shows that soft, living tissue can power small machines without bulky motors.
Source: ScienceDaily →
Dwarf reedsnakes in Southeast Asia can roll across the ground about four times faster than they slither. Multi-angle video showed how they pull it off: the back of the body spins rapidly while the head stays steady, facing forward at a nearly constant height. It's a clever solution to a problem that usually keeps animals from rolling at all.
Source: ScienceDaily →
“Often, too, our own light goes out, and is rekindled by some experience we go through with a fellow-man. Thus we have each of us cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flames within us.”— Albert Schweitzer, Memoirs of Childhood and Youth (1924)