Sunny Saturday News

Editor OGN Daily
Oct 25
3 min read

Celebrating the start of the weekend with a global round up of positive news nuggets.

Off-Screen Passion

“You often think, where are the good news stories?” Cate Blanchett recently told the BBC. “And we’re actually sitting inside one.” By “one,” she means the Millennium Seed Bank at England’s Wakehurst botanic garden, home to the world’s largest wild seed conservation project - and the Australian actor’s latest off-screen passion. This year, Blanchett has taken on a new role as an ambassador for the seed bank, which safeguards more than 2.5 billion seeds from 40,000 wild plant species in vaults kept at minus 20 degrees Celsius. Originally seen as a “doomsday vault” to protect seeds against extinction, the bank has since evolved to play an active role in habitat restoration, including post-wildfire regeneration in Australia - a cause close to Blanchett’s heart.

Bruno Mars on stage in Las Vegas, 2010 — Bruno Mars in Las Vegas, 2010

Music History

According to the Recording Industry Association of America, Bruno Mars' breakout hit Just the Way You Are - released in 2010 - has been certified 21-times Platinum, making it the highest-certified single of all time. The milestone pushes the song past the previous record-holder, Post Malone and Swae Lee's Sunflower, and solidifies Mars' status as one of the most commercially successful artists of the digital era.

Casket Case

A retired Indian air force officer faked his own death to inaugurate a cremation facility he had built in his village. “Wrapped in a traditional white shroud”, 74-year-old Mohan Lal was carried through the streets on a bier, as locals sang ritual chants, said The Indian Express. But when the procession reached the new cremation ground, Lal “suddenly sat up, revealing that the funeral had been staged”. “I wanted to see who truly cared for me,” he said.

Rendering of a new Amazon nuclear plant in Washington state | Amazon

Amazon Goes Nuclear

In the shadow of a service outage that affected millions of users, outside of Richland, Washington, internet commerce giant Amazon is building the first of a series of modular nuclear power stations to protect its data services from outages. We tend to think of Amazon as a place to order, well, just about anything, but it's also the dominant global provider of internet data services through its Amazon Web Services (AWS), which as of 2025 has an annual revenue of over US$123 billion. It's for this reason that the recent outage that impacted over 1,000 companies is such a big deal and why Amazon and other tech companies are investing in restarting or constructing nuclear power plants to provide their data centers with a round-the-clock, reliable source of power with zero emissions.

IBS Treatment

A novel treatment for irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is on the horizon, with the discovery that two specific gut microbes produce serotonin that protects against inflammation and damage. Scientists from Sweden's University of Gothenburg have made a critical discovery about serotonin in the gut, identifying two bacteria that produce the substance themselves. The discovery provides a new avenue of research into novel gut microbe-based treatment strategies for IBS.

China's Cleaner Air

China’s clean-air drive adds years to life expectancy. Air-quality reforms in China have slashed concentrations of fine particulates by nearly half since 2013, preventing an estimated 2.2 million premature deaths annually. New analysis from the University of Chicago shows the average citizen now lives 2.9 years longer, with the clean-air gains rivalling those from decades of U.S. environmental policy - but achieved in just one decade.

“What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.” Henry David Thoreau

On This Day

25 October 1940: American military officer Benjamin O. Davis, Sr., became the first African American general in the U.S. Army when he was promoted to brigadier general.