Good News Tuesday

18 minutes ago
4 min read

Today's smorgasbord of tasty news nuggets to put a spring in your step.

George Michael playing his guitar in the video for 'Faith' — George Michael in the video for Faith | Credit: Vevo/YouTube

Striking a Chord

One of the most iconic items in George Michael’s career, the acoustic guitar he energetically strummed in the video for 1987’s Faith, is going up for auction. The guitar, a Gretsch Synchromatic 160 with a sunburst finish to the body, is expected to fetch £100,000. It comes with a case featuring the words Rockabilly Rebel pasted on it – a reference to the twangy, 1950s-referencing sound of Faith, which topped the US charts for four weeks and sold over 25 million copies. It became a foundation stone of Michael’s post-Wham! solo career. Auction House, Sworders, is putting the guitar under the hammer on 29 October. But how about this guitar...

David Gilmour’s 1969 Fender Stratocaster: Pink Floyd guitar is most expensive ever sold.

Pristine stretch of the Klamath River — Klamath River | Western Rivers Conservancy

Spectacular Success

After the Largest River Restoration in US History, chinook salmon have recolonised 88 percent of their historic range on the Klamath River, with more than 13,000 fish passing the old Iron Gate Dam site in 2025, up from 7,700 the year before. Two years after the dams’ removal, it’s going better than anyone predicted. "The biological response has been much faster than I, and most of us, expected. We expected salmon to eventually recolonize habitat above the former dams, but within two years we’ve seen thousands of Chinook salmon moving into the upper basin and spawning across an enormous portion of their historic range."

Major Census

How do you count 1.4 billion people? Well, India currently has more than three million census-takers going door to door for its first count in 15 years. A second phase, starting in February 2027, will ask about caste for the first time since 1931. Sounds procedural, but it’s actually a huge lever for change: India’s affirmative-action quota system has been running on those colonial-era caste numbers for nearly a century. Bloomberg says the count will also trigger a 2023 law reserving a third of lower-house seats for women, a rollout that's been on hold pending fresh census data.

The new Range Rover Electric driving across a river — Credit: Jaguar Land Rover

The Electric

After ruling the luxury SUV roost for over half a century, the Range Rover is finally available in a fully electric version. Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) says it's worked on this for the last decade, and filed more than 300 patents along the way to bring it to life. Range Rover is deadly serious about making the Electric just as capable as its ICE vehicles for puttering about in the wilderness, to the point that it's tested this thing across some 900,000 miles (1,448,410 km), including freezing mountain ranges and sweltering deserts. Impressively, this version weighs the same as the V8-powered model, despite having a giant battery pack in the floorboard.

Standing Ovation

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has granted full approval to Rasonque (daraxonrasib), as a first-in-class daily pill for advanced pancreatic cancer. The treatment made headlines in June when initial trial data presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting drew a rare, spontaneous standing ovation from thousands of oncologists. The pill doubles median survival for deadly pancreatic cancer, with some patients living for years. Now the FDA has approved it, compressing a process that normally takes months into weeks because the benefit was so large, and the need so urgent. “We can now envisage a future with no chemotherapy needed.”

Plug and Play Solar

The UK has just received government approval for 'balcony solar' and now lawmakers in California have passed the Plug and Play Solar Act to legalize it too. It is already both popular and abundant in places like Germany. Gov. Gavin Newsom still needs to sign the bill, which had bipartisan support. Balcony solar makes home solar more accessible for renters and homeowners. Once it becomes law, it would allow households to install systems up to 1,200 watts without utility approval or interconnection typically required of rooftop systems. A 400-watt system could cover 14 percent of an apartment’s energy use.

"May your future be limited only by your dreams." Christa McAuliffe

On This Day

Michelangelo's statue of David inside the Galleria dell'Accademia

8 September 1504: Michelangelo's statue of David is unveiled in Florence, outside the Palazzo Vecchio in the Piazza della Signoria, rather than its original intended spot on the roofline of the Florence Cathedral. Chosen by a committee of prominent artists and citizens -including Leonardo da Vinci and Sandro Botticelli - as a civic symbol of Florentine strength and independence. The original sculpture was moved indoors to the Galleria dell'Accademia in 1873 to protect it from weather damage. A marble replica stands in its place outside the Palazzo Vecchio.