30,000 endangered coho salmon just returned to California rivers that hadn't seen one in 20 years

Happy Labor Day. Today feels like a good day to celebrate things that took a long time and a lot of people. Thirty thousand coho salmon back in California rivers that had been quiet for decades. A Finnish company bringing a gym to a Paris homeless shelter. A 24-year-old in Washington Heights who bought a grabber stick and some bags and just started cleaning, every single day, until his neighbors came outside and joined him.

We also have scientists who revived dying Red Sea coral using probiotics in open water for the first time, which is the kind of sentence that deserves a moment.

Here's your good news. Enjoy the day off.

—Stephanie S

The central California coast coho salmon is the most endangered subset of the coho species. In many waterways their existence had become a memory. Usal Creek hadn't seen a live coho in 10 years. The Gualala River watershed hadn't recorded one in two decades. Then last season, a record 30,000 returned to the rivers that empty into the Mendocino coast, ten times the average of 3,000 over the previous decade, and double the total from the season before.

NOAA spent years assembling a coalition that included timber companies, the nonprofit Trout Unlimited, tribal partners, local NGOs, and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to undertake more than 100 small improvement projects across the watershed. Undersized road culverts were widened. Log jams were removed. Straightened waterways were returned to their natural, meandering state. Last summer, NOAA and The Nature Conservancy completed the largest-ever habitat restoration project in the Ten Mile watershed.

"Recovering salmon is undeniably challenging," said Joshua Fuller, NOAA's Coastal California Branch Supervisor. "These numbers are very encouraging and demonstrate that recovery is possible when management, habitat, ocean, and hydrologic conditions are aligned." His colleague Joe Pecharich, who has been supporting restoration projects in the region for 20 years, put it more simply.

"I am overjoyed," Pecharich said. "Everybody's just ecstatic about how many coho there are. Many of us never thought we'd see something like this in our lifetime."

Coral bleaches when heat stress causes it to expel the algae living inside it. Without those algae, which provide up to 90% of the coral's energy through photosynthesis, the coral starves and dies. Researchers have known for years that probiotics, beneficial bacteria harvested from healthy corals, can help stressed corals recover. What they hadn't managed was to make it work in the open sea, during an actual heatwave, on wild reefs. Until now.

Dr. Erika Santoro and her team at KAUST University in Saudi Arabia treated Acropora coral in the central Red Sea during a 2022 heatwave, when daily average seawater temperatures were running between 87.6 and 89.5 degrees Fahrenheit. They tested both standard probiotic treatments and post-biotic treatments, which use inactivated bacteria rather than live ones and offer practical advantages including longer shelf life, easier storage, and lower production costs. After 15 days, one probiotic and one post-biotic formula had significantly improved coral health.

Genetic and metabolic testing confirmed that both treatments had restructured the corals' microbial profiles. Post-biotic treated corals showed increased levels of Cobetia, a bacteria that specifically helps corals tolerate heat stress. "When an innovative idea like this actually works, particularly under field conditions," said Dr. Santoro, "we are positively surprised." The possibility of using post-biotics at scale, with no refrigeration required, opens a new avenue for coral restoration globally.

Every sales leader knows the feeling. You walk into a pipeline review with a number you believe in, and twenty minutes later, you're defending every line item to a CEO who just wants to know what's actually going to close.

HubSpot Sales Hub ends that conversation. Every deal, every rep's activity, and every buyer signal are all in one place and updated automatically. So your forecast is built on what's actually happening. And when you present that number, you can stand behind it.

Get a demo

Omnigym, a Finnish gym equipment company, partnered with Emmaüs Solidarité, a French nonprofit that supports people experiencing homelessness, to install an outdoor fitness unit in the shady courtyard of a Paris homeless shelter. The idea was simple: inactivity is a growing public health problem everywhere, but especially in communities without the money, the membership, or the sense of belonging that a conventional gym requires. So they brought the gym to the people who needed it most.

One month after the equipment arrived, Omnigym collected anonymous self-assessments from residents on their physical health, mental wellbeing, sleep, mood, energy levels, and behavioral changes. Eighty percent reported improved physical health. Ninety percent said it had helped them meet or talk to other people. One resident noted that it had produced "a change in behavior. I smoke less." Another described it simply as "a change in my life, even if only a little."

"We want to democratize physical training and make it accessible to everyone," said Kirsti Laasio, CEO of Omnigym, who calls the initiative The People's Gym. The project asks a straightforward question: what happens when you stop waiting for people to come to the resources and start bringing the resources to the people? The answer, at least in this courtyard in Paris, is that 80% of them report feeling better.

David Clarke lived on 171st Street in Washington Heights, a block he described as a place people avoided. Litter wrapped around every fire hydrant bolt, choked every tree bed on the sidewalk, and covered every surface that a piece of trash could find. Clarke felt powerless to change it. Then he bought $40 worth of cleaning supplies, announced on TikTok that he was going to clean one New York City block every single day for 100 days, and started.

What happened next surprised him. The account went viral. Neighbors who had walked past the same litter for years came outside and started picking it up alongside him. Local businesses donated plants, lumber, and equipment. Clarke traveled to the upstate mountains to source native plants, then laid soil and mulch in the sidewalk tree beds, planted flowers, and built small wooden fences around them, spending $2,000 of his own money on supplies. City officials started paying attention.

"When this account went viral, I learned that litter was correlated with pride and a sense of community," Clarke wrote on his 100th day. "I could have picked up trash my whole life, but instead I want to give people a reason not to litter." The reason turned out to be beauty itself. A block that looks cared for teaches people to care for it. "That choice and $40 in cleaning materials," he said, "led to a journey that has spanned trash, drugs, politics, and gardening and has made my life and my street unrecognizable."

🐶 UK: A Labrador retriever who gave birth to 12 golden puppies in one litter was reunited with all 12 of her offspring on their first birthday, with their owner describing the gathering as "a real extended family." GNN Animals.

🐕 UK: A terrier named Milo went missing during a walk and was found two days later after spending 48 hours underground in a badger warren, requiring a rescue team to locate him by sound and dig him out. GNN Animals.

🚂 Scandinavia: Sweden and Finland have reconnected their railway networks after a 30-year interruption, reopening a cross-border rail link that had been severed since the 1990s and restoring a direct train connection between the two countries for the first time in a generation. GNN World.

🐟 USA: Maine wildlife officials counted more than 20 million river herring during this year's annual run, the highest total in decades, in a sign that conservation and dam removal efforts along Maine's rivers are producing measurable results. GNN USA.

🦧 Indonesia: Rescued orangutans reintroduced to the wild at the Jantho Reintroduction Site in Aceh, Sumatra, are now raising their own wild-born babies, with at least 10 wild-born offspring now recorded, the ultimate measure of a reintroduction program's success. GNN Animals.

On September 7, 1630, Puritan settlers from England established Boston on the Shawmut Peninsula in Massachusetts Bay, naming it after their home town. From the start, the city was shaped by people arriving with little and building what they needed. The 19th century brought wave after wave of immigrants: Irish to south Boston, Italians to the north, Russians, Jews, and Poles to the west, Syrians, Lebanese, Chinese, and French-Canadians settling throughout. The city tripled in size over the course of a century on the labor of people who were largely starting over.

Boston gave America its first public park, first public school, first subway, and first large public library. Today it hosts nearly 5,000 startups and ranks among the most philanthropic cities in the country by household giving. It is also home to a Red Sox team that has been causing problems since 1912.

Other notable September 7 events:

1968: Led Zeppelin made their live debut, 58 years ago today, playing to 1,200 young people at a school in Copenhagen, after which a local reviewer called their performance "absolutely flawless." They went on to sell 200-300 million records worldwide.

1927: Philo Farnsworth successfully transmitted the first electronic television image, 99 years ago today, one year shy of a full century, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where his 300 patents laid the groundwork for modern television.

1969: Monty Python's Flying Circus recorded its first episode for the BBC, 57 years ago today, introducing the world to the Dead Parrot, the Ministry of Silly Walks, and six highly educated British comedians who still haven't stopped being quoted.

1986: Desmond Tutu became the first Black leader of the South African Anglican Church, 40 years ago today, one of the most consequential figures in the history of the anti-apartheid movement.

— Theodore Roosevelt

Every day brings amazing advances and uplifting moments that remind us just how wonderful the world can be. Here are five reasons why today is the best time ever to be alive:

🧬 Programming Life From Scratch: Scientists have built synthetic cells containing only the minimum number of genes required to sustain life, creating a programmable biological chassis that can be loaded with new functions, offering a platform for manufacturing medicines, materials, and fuels entirely inside living cells that do exactly what their designers intend.

🔬 Sensors That Live Inside You: Tiny wireless sensors small enough to be implanted in the body are now entering clinical use for conditions including epilepsy, heart failure, and cancer, monitoring disease biomarkers, organ function, and drug levels in real time and transmitting that data to external devices without any wires, batteries, or follow-up procedures.

🌊 Replanting Coastlines From the Air: Drones are now seeding mangroves across degraded coastal areas at a pace and scale that human planting teams could never match, rebuilding forests that sequester carbon, shield communities from storm surge, and restore the nursery habitat that young marine life depends on.

🔭 Reading the Chemistry of Distant Worlds: The James Webb Space Telescope is now detecting specific molecules including water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, and sulfur dioxide in the atmospheres of exoplanets hundreds of light-years away, building the first real census of what other worlds are actually made of.

🌱 Rice That Grows Back: Scientists in China have developed a perennial rice variety that can be harvested multiple times a year for several consecutive years without replanting, dramatically reducing labor, seed costs, and soil disruption compared to conventional annual rice farming, with more than 500,000 farmers now growing it.

Spread a little good news, and good things come back your way.

When you share your unique link, you’re not just passing along uplifting stories; you’re earning a few surprises from us, too. Brighten someone’s day, grow the circle, and enjoy some goodies while you’re at it. You’re currently at {{rp_num_referrals}} referrals.

Click the button below, then copy and paste the link to share.

If that button doesn’t work, you can copy and share your referral link with your friends: {{rp_refer_url}}

Manage your referrals here