Positive News Tuesday

Editor OGN Daily
Oct 21
3 min read

Some tasty bite-sized chunks of positive news to perk up the day.

Reese Witherspoon wearing a black and white dress — Reese Witherspoon

Reese's 'Big Leap'

For more than three decades, Reese Witherspoon has been many things to many people: the Oscar-winning star of Walk the Line; the pink-clad Elle Woods of Legally Blonde; the Hollywood producer who brought Gone Girl and Big Little Lies to the screen. Now, she’s adding another title to her résumé: novelist. This month, the 49-year-old releases her first work of fiction, Gone Before Goodbye, co-written with the bestselling thriller author Harlan Coben. Already tipped to hit the bestseller lists on publication, the book follows Maggie McCabe, a former army combat surgeon who takes a discreet medical job for an anonymous client – only for a patient to vanish under her care, setting off an international conspiracy. “I’ve never had an idea for a novel before,” Witherspoon said recently. “I’m always the actor who shows up and executes someone else’s vision. I thought, maybe it’s time to take the big leap and build the world myself.”

Wind Farm Reef

An artificial reef designed to support marine life and protect turbines from storm surges has been created at an offshore wind farm in England. In a pioneering pilot, some 75,000 ‘reef cubes’ have been installed. The hollow cubes are made from waste aggregate from clay mines, and replicate habitats favoured by anemones, oysters and mussels. It's an “important step forward in testing solutions that can both safeguard our assets and contribute to the marine environment. We look forward to monitoring the outcomes and sharing the learnings.”

Humpback whale breaching off the Australian coast — Credit: Trish Franklin | The Oceania Project

"Near Miracle"

Once hunted almost to extinction (only about 150 were left in the 1960s), the group of humpback whales currently migrating down Australia's east coast has bounced back - and then some. Marine scientists believe there are now more than 50,000 eastern Australian humpback whales. That's around 20,000 more individuals than the estimated pre-whaling population of the early 1900s. Wally Franklin, who has studied eastern Australian humpbacks for more than 30 years, called their comeback "remarkable", adding: "The recovery of the group is a near miracle."

Ahead of Target

India installed 29.5 GW of new solar capacity in the first nine months of 2025, more than the total ever installed by countries like France or South Korea. The surge means India will likely exceed its 2030 renewable targets five years early. Solar now supplies over 10 percent of the country’s electricity.

Power of Education

Vietnam has cut extreme poverty from around 50 percent in the early ’90s to approximately one percent today. The government’s playbook was education-centred: universalise primary education, push secondary, professionalise teachers, and pair schooling with rural electrification, roads, clinics and clean water (nearly 100 percent of households now have power). The outcomes include adult literacy reaching 96 percent, with youth literacy essentially universal, and Vietnamese teens outperforming peers in richer countries.

Salt Energy Storage

A new molten salt energy storage system using melted salt could soon help solve one of renewable energy’s biggest problems - the intermittency of available power. The technology can store power from solar panels and wind turbines for days or even weeks, then release it when needed. Two companies, Denmark’s Hyme Energy and Switzerland’s Sulzer, are working together to build what they call the world’s largest salt-based energy storage system. When complete, it will store enough power to run around 100,000 homes for 10 hours.

“Nine-tenths of wisdom is appreciation. Go find somebody’s hand and squeeze it, while there’s time.” Dale Dauten