Positive News Thursday

Editor OGN Daily
Nov 6, 2025
4 min read

Thursday's tasty smorgasbord of upbeat news nuggets.

For My Next Trick...

Perhaps you know actor Jesse Eisenberg from his Oscar-nominated turn in The Social Network or as a conniving magician in the Now You See Me series. Now you can know him as the celebrity who’s donating a kidney to a total stranger. Seriously! Eisenberg, ever the medical altruist, revealed in an interview conducted mid-blood drive that he’s donating one of his kidneys in six weeks. It was a “no brainer,” he said, to potentially save someone’s life, even if he doesn’t know them personally. If you find Eisenberg’s efforts inspiring, consider learning more about the living kidney donor programs in your community.

3,500-year-old sculpture of an Egyptian head — Credit: Netherlands Information & Heritage Inspectorate

Restitution

The Netherlands has said it will return a stolen 3,500-year-old sculpture to Egypt. It is "highly likely" the stone head, dating from the time of the pharaohs, was plundered during the Arab Spring in either 2011 or 2012, according to the Dutch Information & Heritage Inspectorate. A decade later, it turned up at an arts and antiques fair in Maastricht and, following an anonymous tip-off, Dutch authorities determined it had been stolen and exported illegally. Dutch outgoing prime minister Dick Schoof made the pledge to hand it back as he attended the opening of the archaeological Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza last weekend.

woman wearing augmented-reality glasses — Credit: Moorfields Eye Hospital

Vision Restored

More than 5 million people worldwide are impacted by geographic atrophy due to age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of irreversible blindness. There’s previously been no treatment for the condition - until now. It’s all thanks to PRIMA, a tiny eye implant half as thick as a human hair. When paired with augmented-reality glasses, the pioneering device is the first to enable people to read letters, numbers, and words with an eye that had lost its sight. “In the history of artificial vision, this represents a new era,” Mahi Muqit, who led the U.K. arm of the trial, said in a news release. “Blind patients are actually able to have meaningful central vision restoration, which has never been done before. Getting back the ability to read is a major improvement in their quality of life, lifts their mood, and helps to restore their confidence and independence.”

Friedrich Heyser's oil-on-canvas of 'Ophelia' — Friedrich Heyser's oil-on-canvas | Wikimedia Commons

Museum Gets a Surprise

Taylor Swift’s newest album, The Life of a Showgirl, was an instant success, breaking multiple music industry records since debuting last month. While many fans seem to love all of the singer-songwriter’s new songs, one track in particular has risen above the rest: The Fate of Ophelia, which has spent three straight weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100. For one museum in western Germany, the song’s popularity has been an unexpected boon, says Smithsonian Magazine. Swifties are now flocking to Museum Wiesbaden to see a Friedrich Heyser painting that appears to have inspired the opening scene of the The Fate of Ophelia music video. The moody oil-on-canvas artwork, painted around 1900, shows an ethereal woman in a white dress floating in a pool of water, surrounded by flowers and leaves.

a deep-sea “death ball” sponge — Credit: Nippon Foundation-Nekton Ocean Census / Schmidt Ocean Institute

Deep-Sea Predator

Ocean scientists have found a deep-sea predator that looks a lot less scary than its name. Dubbed a “death ball” sponge, the species is somewhat translucent, located at depths of nearly 12,000 feet, and covered in tiny hooks that are used to trap prey. The Nippon Foundation-Nekton Ocean Census says it’s among 30 previously unknown deep-sea species recently found in the Southern Ocean, one of the most remote and under-sampled parts of the world. Using cutting-edge technology such as seafloor mapping and high-definition ROV imagery, teams aboard a Schmidt Ocean Institute research vessel discovered this treasure trove during two 2025 expeditions.

Speedy payment for workers

Old-Fashioned Tech

With all the hype about AI, it’s nice to see a couple of stories about how things can go right using old-fashioned digital technology. Such as VoxDev's report about how Rwanda’s national telemedicine platform, working with a team of researchers, compared phone-based consultations with traditional clinic visits. They found that telemedicine was 30 percent faster, 40 percent cheaper, and led to fewer unnecessary drugs or tests. Given there’s 2.5 million Rwandans already using the platform, this is pretty good news. Elsewhere in Africa, Kenya just slashed payment delays for vaccination campaign workers from 15 days to just 72 hours with a new digital system that transfers pay directly to their mobile wallets via M-Pesa. More than 120,000 workers are now registered, with 127 officials trained to manage the system across 13 counties.

"The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us." Bill Waterson

On This Day

6 November 2012: Tammy Duckworth becomes the first disabled woman and first person born in Thailand to be elected to US Congress, representing Illinois. A U.S. Army helicopter pilot, Duckworth lost both her legs in the Iraq War after her helicopter was shot down in 2004.