Episode Description: This week starts with casino Easter eggs and a prom-posal, because apparently Good Friday is full of surprises. Then Arielle and Karissa get into the actual news: a teenager built a working microplastic filter in her garage, Mexico’s monarch butterflies had their best winter in nearly a decade, and a $375 million jury…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM After a severe wildfire, the first visible signs of life returning are often flowers or birds. What you cannot see is what arrives even earlier. Within weeks of a blaze, tiny fungal fruiting bodies push through scorched soil and release spores, briefly carpeting otherwise-bare ground in splashes of ocher,…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Most sleep advice is about duration or routine: go to bed at the same time, put the phone down, get eight hours. Much less attention goes to what your body is physically doing for those eight hours. Depending on how you sleep, your brain may be clearing waste products…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM For Carole Greig, 70, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s almost three years ago, the prospect is personal. “How fantastic that we can be given some more independence, that we’re going to be able to cope on our own and not be a burden,” she said after testing the technology….
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Easter is observed by roughly 2.4 billion Christians worldwide. That covers an enormous range of countries, climates, and histories. There is no single Easter, really. There’s the version you grew up with, and then there are all the others. Florence explodes a medieval cart on Easter Sunday Every Easter…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Between 2022 and 2024, roughly 247 people per 100,000 in the UK died from cancer each year. That number matters most when you compare it to 1989, when the rate stood at 355 per 100,000. It is, by every measure, a historic decline. But the headline number only tells…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM A New Mexico jury ruled last Tuesday that Meta knowingly harmed children’s mental health, made false or misleading statements about platform safety, and engaged in trade practices the jury called “unconscionable.” The trial ran nearly seven weeks. The verdict caps the first case of its kind to reach a…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY’S EDITORIAL TEAM When TJ McGee overdosed in his UC Berkeley dorm room two years ago, his roommates hesitated before calling for help. He lay on the floor, pale and seizing, while they weighed the risk: call for help and potentially face university consequences, or wait and hope. That hesitation is exactly…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY’S EDITORIAL TEAM Something has shifted over the past three decades in how Americans relate to each other. In 1990, about three percent of Americans said they had no close friends. Today, that number sits somewhere between 12 and 20 percent, depending on who you ask. Jaimie Krems, an associate professor of…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM The story starts with a newspaper article and a neighborhood that wasn’t getting help. A few years ago, Mia Heller came across a report about water quality in her community in Warrington, Virginia. Tests had found the local water was heavily contaminated with PFAS and microplastics. Government funds to…
