Tuesday's Upbeat News
- Mar 10
- 3 min read
Updated: Mar 13
Some tasty bite-sized chunks of good news to perk up the day.
Impressive Growth
Launched in 2024, the Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) continues its impressive growth with a sold-out game at Madison Square Garden. New York Sirens host Seattle Torrent on April 4 in the PWHL’s first-ever game at the Garden. Tickets are already sold out for the 18,000-capacity venue, which would be a new U.S. attendance record for a professional women’s ice hockey game. Furthermore, partly in response to this surging demand, StubHub has launched a dedicated platform just for women’s sports tickets. The company’s internal data shows a 38 percent year-over-year increase in demand for tickets to Professional Women’s Hockey League games for the first eight weeks of 2026, and demand for PWHL tickets is up nearly 60 percent compared to pre-Olympic levels.
Turtle Mobility
A turtle named Moses, missing both of its back legs, is getting a second chance at mobility thanks to a caring human and a 3D printer. Using the printer, an aquarist going by the Instagram handle jawscritters designed a custom-made wheelchair that supplements Moses’s movement. After fielding feedback from a community of makers on Reddit, jawscritters made several adjustments to the original design. Now, with the help of that online community, Moses is moving around better than before thanks to his pair of new wheels.
Death Valley Blooms
Spring may still be a few weeks away, meteorologically, but you wouldn’t know it looking at Death Valley in California today. Wildflowers are popping up in what’s likely to be the park’s greatest bloom since 2016. And the best may still be yet to come, as many of the higher elevation flowers haven’t opened yet, according to the National Park Service. The lush growth at one of the driest places on Earth comes thanks to three conditions aligning: well-spaced rainfall across autumn, winter, and spring; warm temperatures; and favorable wind conditions. The bright yellow desert gold seen in the photo above (aka Geraea canescens) is especially prominent at the moment, but other blooms are expected to join the colorful party later this month, with even more emerging from April through June.
Original Animation
Disney’s Pixar animal adventure Hoppers was No. 1 at the global box office with $88 million, an encouraging result for an original animated film. It generated $42 million overseas and $46 million domestically. After struggling with non-franchise fare in recent years, Hoppers is primed to be Pixar’s first original hit in nearly a decade. This marks the largest debut for original animation since the studio’s 2017’s musical fantasy Coco, which became a powerhouse with $823 million by the end of its theatrical run.
Martian Ocean
Mars was once a ‘blue planet’, with a massive ocean covering approximately half of the Martian surface, a new study has concluded. An international research team has identified unmistakable geological structures that resemble river deltas on Earth, providing a ‘smoking gun’ for a Martian coastline. These delta remnants now lie beneath wind-sculpted dunes, but their shapes remain discernible in high-resolution images from Mars orbiters and enable the researchers to reconstruct a former sea level and coastline. They calculate that the ancient ocean - roughly 3 billion years ago - was at least as large as Earth’s Arctic Ocean, stretching across much of the northern hemisphere.
Texas Solar Crown
Texas has passed California to become the leader in utility-scale solar. Data for 2025, released last week by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, shows that Texas generated 58,634 gigawatt-hours from utility-scale solar, enough to pull ahead of California’s 53,713 gigawatt-hours. But California can continue to claim the distinction of leading the country in electricity from small-scale solar, which EIA defines as any project with capacity of less than 1 megawatt. And if we look at the sum of utility-scale and small-scale solar, California remains ahead.
“Love is flower like; Friendship is like a sheltering tree.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge
On This Day
10 March 1849: Abraham Lincoln applies for a patent (only US President to do so) for a device to lift a boat over shoals and obstructions. Conceived after his experiences with grounded riverboats, the device used expandable bellows on the sides of hulls to lift vessels over shallow shoals. While never manufactured, a scale model is held by the Smithsonian Institution. Patent granted 22 May 1849.
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