Upbeat News Tuesday
- 11 hours ago
- 4 min read
Today's tasty bite-sized chunks of positive news from around the world to perk things up.
Enchanted Islands
Mangrove trees thrive in environments that would kill most other plants. Found along the coastlines of the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Australasia, these vital plants shelter vulnerable creatures, absorb excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and helps protect coastlines from erosion. The Mangrove Photography Awards celebrate this nature powerhouse each year with captivating images that document their beauty and their struggle. One of OGN's favourites from the 2026 competition is Mangroves of the Enchanted Islands, showing a squadron of golden rays gliding through a shallow mangrove cove at Concha Perla, Isabela Island - one of Galápagos’s most accessible and popular wildlife spots.
Remarkable Comeback: Mangroves are one of the world's unsung environmental heroes, so it's very good news that they are staging an unexpected revival.
No Time Like Now
This month, 64-year-old John Adesoye graduated as a registered nurse from the University of the West of England after studying at the institution alongside one of his five children. He’s already secured a nursing role at a hospital and noted that more higher education isn’t off the table for him - and shouldn’t be for others later in life either. “Don’t listen to people who say you’re too old for university. If I can do it, others can too,” he said. “People are more brilliant than they think and they’re stronger than they think.”
2026 Fields Medal
It is awarded once every four years and generally considered to be Nobel of mathematics. Now, for only the third time in 90 years, has been awarded to a woman. Dr. Hong Wang, from Guilin, China, received the prize for her 127-page proof of a long-standing conjecture at the intersection of multiple branches of mathematics. She had proved the three-dimensional Kakeya conjecture.
Squirrel Bridge
In the city of Longview, Washington, there’s a bridge that stretches about 60 feet long but is only a few inches wide, just big enough for little squirrel paws to scurry over a busy road. It’s called the Nutty Narrows Squirrel Pedestrian Bridge. The wildly delightful invention was built in 1963 by architect Amos Peters, who wanted to help bright-eyed and bushy-tailed critters avoid becoming roadkill. It has inspired numerous other bridges, including one made by Nikita Kozhekin, a resident in the neighboring city of Duvall, who launched his own take on a squirrel bridge this May, made with a few ropes connected by two trees. “Imagine a world where every tree on every street is connected by bridges, where millions of crossings span the sky, and habitats are safe and connected,” Kozhekin wrote on his website. “How wonderful would that be?”
Leonardo's 280m Single Span Bridge: We have, amongst other genius scribblings, his drawings for helicopters and parachutes - and a 280m single span bridge from 1502 which those clever people at MIT have now proved would actually have worked.
Astronomers Baffled
Something we have never seen before is shooting out of a rare exploding star in our own galaxy, astronomers say. The material - likened to “bullets” by the scientists who first spotted them - appear to be clumps of gas that are being sent out at up to 20 million miles per hour. They are coming from an exploding star that is the rarest object of its kind in our galaxy. Astronomers do not know exactly what the bullets are, or where they are coming from. Nothing like them has ever been seen in other exploding stars anywhere in the universe.
1964 Shelby Cobra
Whether or not you've watched the entirety of Ford v Ferrari, you likely know enough about Carroll Shelby to be aware that he was an American motoring icon. One of the keys to his success was this stunning 1964 Shelby Cobra Daytona Coupe that's heading to auction with Gooding Christie's at Pebble Beach in August. This particular Daytona, chassis CSX2300, is the third of six of these models ever built. Shelby's focus was exclusively on beating Ferrari's 250 GTO, and it was in 1965 when CSX2300 earned itself and Shelby a place in history. It was clad in white paint with red and blue stripes to represent Ford of France and the Shelby Cobra Daytona Coupe had not only beaten Ferrari, but won the entire FIA GT Championship. It was the 1965 win that helped Shelby prove that Americans could take on the best Europe had to offer, and specifically the ever-triumphant Ferrari 250 GT. It also further proved that not only was Shelby adept at racing, he could make one hell of a car. Hardly surprising then that the car has a current estimated worth of at least $25 million.
“And there comes a time in your life when you realize that if you don’t take the opportunity to be happy, you may never get another chance again.” Richard Russo in Empire Falls.
On This Day
28 July 1893: A petition organized by Kate Sheppard, demanding women's suffrage, is delivered to New Zealand's parliament, signed by over 25,000 women, a fifth of the adult European female population. Two weeks later, pro-suffrage MP Sir John Hall presented the massive rolled-up sheets - carried into the House of Representatives in a wheelbarrow. On 8 September, the Electoral Bill passed the Legislative Council by a narrow 20-to-18 margin, and on 19 September, Governor Lord Glasgow signed the Electoral Act into law, making New Zealand the first self-governing country in the world where women won the right to vote in parliamentary elections.
Today's Articles
Psyche Mission: NASA's amazing spacecraft video as it zoomed past Mars en route to the trillion dollar Pysche asteroid.
Mood Boosting Video
Surprisingly Mesmerising: The miniature world of a model train backyard.