Positive News Tuesday

Editor OGN Daily
Aug 12
3 min read

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

Still Life With Carafe, Bottle and Fruit, Paul Cézanne, 1906 — Still Life, Paul Cezanne, 1906 | Henry & Rose Pearlman Foundation / Bruce White

Generous Donation

A collection of dozens of paintings by some of the most renowned artists of the 19th and 20th centuries will be donated to three museums in New York and Los Angeles. The Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation announced that it will be donating its entire collection of 63 works to the Brooklyn Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. “We inherited a responsibility, not a collection,” Daniel Edelman, president of the foundation and grandson of the Pearlmans, tells the Los Angeles Times’ Jessica Gelt. “This doesn’t belong to us, it belongs to the public - we’re caretakers of it.”

new species called Mobula yarae (or the Atlantic manta ray) swimming in the ocean — Credit: Bryant Turffs

New Manta Species

Andrea Marshall has dedicated her life to studying manta rays, learning everything she possibly can about the graceful marine creatures, reports Smithsonian Magazine. So, when she spotted an unusual-looking manta ray off the eastern coast of Mexico roughly 15 years ago, Marshall knew right away that she had made an important discovery. Now, it’s official: Marshall and her colleagues have identified a new species called Mobula yarae, or the Atlantic manta ray. It’s the third known species of manta ray in the world, joining the giant oceanic manta (Mobula birostris) and the reef manta (Mobula alfredi). M. yarae is named after Yara, a mermaid-like spirit from Brazilian mythology and the main features that set it apart from the other species are V-shaped white patches on its shoulders, lighter coloring around its mouth and eyes and dark spots on its abdomen. M. yarae can grow as large as the giant oceanic manta - between 16 and 20 feet wide.

Strange But True

A Paris startup provides the opportunity for couples to sell tickets to their wedding to a handful of strangers via an app in order to help pay their costs. In return, the paying ticket-holders, who may not otherwise be invited to many weddings, can mingle with other guests and enjoy somebody’s happy day.

Jen Pawol dressed in her Major League Baseball attire — MLB's first

First Woman Umpire

Jen Pawol has just become Major League Baseball's first woman umpire to call a regular-season game. It only took almost 150 years for the league to welcome a woman onto the diamond to umpire, but now that she’s here, good luck keeping the door shut behind her. “It was super emotional to finally be living that phone call that I’d been hoping for and working towards for quite a while, and I just felt super full - I feel like a fully charged battery ready to go,” Pawol told CNN ahead of her debut.

Blurry image of 3I/ATLAS hurtling through space — Credit: NASA/ESA/David Jewitt (UCLA) | Image processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScl)

Fastest Ever Comet

The Hubble Space Telescope has snapped images of a recently discovered interstellar visitor hurtling through our solar system. Traveling at 130,000 mph, 3I/ATLAS is the fastest comet ever observed by astronomers, says NASA. Furthermore, it’s only the third known object to pass through our solar system from deep space ever. In this case, it likely originated in an unknown star system far across the Milky Way galaxy - but don’t expect astronomers to get more specific. “No one knows where the comet came from. It’s like glimpsing a rifle bullet for a thousandth of a second,” Hubble observations science team leader David Jewitt. “You can’t project that back with any accuracy to figure out where it started on its path.”

Male Pill

Finally, researchers are closing in on an oral male contraceptive pill that works without hormones, offers full reversibility and - most strikingly - has caused zero side effects. The pill, called YCT-529, which has an entirely new kind of contraceptive mechanism, has passed a critical human safety benchmark and will now advance to efficacy trials, and it could potentially be widely available from YourChoice Therapeutics within a few years.

“The future depends on what you do today.” Mahatma Gandhi