A 745-pound bluefin tuna just showed up in the North Sea for the first time in 60 years

Happy Wednesday. Back-to-school season has a way of making everything feel like a fresh start. Today's lead story is about a fisherman out of Whitby who pulled a 745-pound Atlantic bluefin tuna onto his boat, the first caught in the North Sea in 60 years. A University of Exeter researcher said it plainly: bluefin tuna can only be in those waters if the ecosystem beneath them is healthy.

We also have the FDA's first approval of a drug that targets the root cause of narcolepsy rather than just its symptoms, a Catholic high school in Tulsa where seniors mob the parking lot on day one demanding freshmen kiss their parents goodbye, and 3,000 endangered mountain frogs released into the California wilderness by the San Diego Zoo.

Here's your good news

—Stephanie S

Jack Gardner couldn't believe what was on the end of his line. The Atlantic bluefin tuna fighting for hours on his boat Dominator, out of Whitby on England's northeast coast, weighed 745 pounds and came within 112 pounds of a fishery record. More importantly, it was the first Atlantic bluefin caught in the North Sea in 60 years, in waters where a thriving tuna fishing industry had once been a cornerstone of the British economy.

The collapse came the way these things usually do: overfishing of the tuna and their herring prey until the fishery simply gave out. The UK has spent years working to restore those stocks through careful catch limits and fisheries management, and the results are beginning to show. Dr. Lucy Hawkes of the University of Exeter, whose team routinely tags bluefin off the southwest coast of Britain, noted that the return of a tuna this size means the ecosystem beneath it had to be in good health.

"Bluefin tuna are top predators who can only be in these waters if the ecosystems underneath them are healthy," she said. The fish Gardner caught may belong to a completely different population from the ones Dr. Hawkes monitors on the opposite coast, suggesting the recovery is broader than a single program.

"It jumped out of the water," Gardner told the BBC. "We all just looked at each other in awe." Read the full story.

Narcolepsy type 1 affects 120,000 Americans and has always been treated sideways: stimulants to fight the daytime drowsiness, depressants to dampen the sudden muscle collapse known as cataplexy. Neither approach touched the underlying cause, which is the death of brain cells that produce orexin, a chemical that helps regulate wakefulness. A new drug called Orzeyful changes that.

Developed by Takeda and FDA-approved on August 5th, Orzeyful mimics the body's production of orexin rather than papering over its absence. In a trial of 273 patients, those who took the twice-daily pill for 12 weeks stayed awake longer during the day and rested better at night compared to placebo, with side effects that were common but considered low in severity.

"This new drug is the first medicine that impacts the underlying biology of the disease, treating narcolepsy type 1 as a whole," said Tiffany Farchione MD, Director of the FDA's Division of Psychiatry. Trial participant Tyler Chapman put it more simply: "It's the best thing that has ever happened to me. My quality of life is so much better." Orexin's links to ADHD and Parkinson's also open the door to future research well beyond narcolepsy. Read the full story.

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Bishop Kelly High School in Tulsa has a tradition that began in 2001, when the senior class decided that the annual pranks played on incoming freshmen should be replaced with something kinder, if still embarrassing. On the first day of school, the entire senior class swarms the parking lot as parents drop off their kids and demands that every freshman do the most mortifying thing imaginable for a 14-year-old.

Kiss their parent goodbye.

The seniors mob the arriving cars, cheering and chanting, refusing to let anyone pass until the goodbye kiss is delivered. "We all had to do it," one senior told CBS News. "That's why it's perfect," said another, when asked what could be more embarrassing.

Parents drive away with tears in their eyes. The freshmen walk in with red cheeks and, whether they know it yet or not, a memory they'll carry for years. CBS News Steve Hartman caught it all on camera for his "On the Road" segment. Watch the video.

The mountain yellow-legged frog was once abundant across the high-elevation lakes and streams of Southern California's mountains. Disease, introduced predators, wildfire, and drought have reduced its population by more than 98%. What's left is being brought back, one careful release at a time, by the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance and its conservation partners.

This year's release sent more than 3,000 frogs and tadpoles into Bluff Lake in the Big Bear area and several other sites across the San Bernardino and San Jacinto mountains. Zoo conservationists watched them hop out of their small carrying crates and disappear into the water. It is part of a 20-year breeding and reintroduction program run in partnership with the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the US Geological Survey, and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Since the program began in 2006, more than 10,000 mountain yellow-legged frogs and tadpoles have been returned to their native mountain habitat. What began as a rescue effort has grown into a comprehensive program covering breeding, genetic diversity, disease management, and habitat restoration. Read the full story.

💉 Global: A study of more than 500,000 older adults found that those who received the Shingrix shingles vaccine had a 24% lower risk of being diagnosed with dementia over four years than those who did not, translating to roughly one dementia case potentially prevented for every 17 people vaccinated. Brown University, published in Annals of Internal Medicine.

🧬 Global: An analysis of 5,821 chromosome-scale genomes spanning 4,454 species found that animal chromosomes follow a limited number of irreversible "evolutionary highways" rather than evolving randomly, one-way genetic changes that have guided life on Earth for more than 600 million years. Published in Science Advances.

🔭 Global: A massive test of gravity across galaxy clusters hundreds of millions of light-years apart confirmed that gravity behaves almost exactly as Newton and Einstein predicted even at cosmic scales, the most rigorous real-world test of the laws of gravity in the history of physics. Published in Physical Review Letters.

🧫 Global: Researchers studying supercentenarians found that people who live past 110 carry unusually high levels of rare immune cells that actively hunt and destroy cancer cells, with those cells expanding and adapting rather than declining even at extreme old age. University of Osaka, published in Cell Reports.

🥦 Global: Researchers at Karolinska Institutet have discovered that gut bacteria can convert nitrate from beets and leafy greens, and iron from plant foods, into protective molecules that lower blood pressure, improve blood sugar control, and reduce liver fat, helping explain why vegetable-rich diets protect against cardiovascular disease. Published in Cell.

On August 26, 1789, the National Constituent Assembly of France approved the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the founding document of the French Revolution. Drafted by the Marquis de Lafayette and the Abbé Sieyès in consultation with Thomas Jefferson, it declared that rights are not granted by governments but are inherent to human nature itself. "Men are born and remain free and equal in rights," it states, words that echoed the American Declaration that had come before it.

The document held these rights to be universal: valid at all times, in every place, for every person. It became the legal and philosophical foundation for a nation of free individuals protected equally by the law, and its influence on constitutional democracies around the world has never stopped.

Other notable August 26 events:

1791: John Fitch was granted a US patent for the first steam-powered boat, 235 years ago today, launching the first commercial steamboat service in America and later envisioning the first steam locomotive.

1939: Major League Baseball was broadcast on television for the first time, 87 years ago today, a game between the Cincinnati Reds and the Brooklyn Dodgers at Ebbets Field, marking the first time any sporting event had ever been televised.

2014: Kate Bush gave her first live concert in 35 years, 12 years ago today, the first of 22 sold-out shows in London, with every ticket gone in under 15 minutes.

1498: Michelangelo was commissioned to carve the Pietà, 528 years ago today, a contract that would produce one of the most emotionally powerful sculptures in Western history, completed by an artist who was just 22 or 23 years old at the time.

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

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:

🧬 Turning Back the Clock in Specific Tissues: Scientists have demonstrated partial reversal of biological aging in the retina, muscle, and brain using gene therapy to restore youthful patterns of gene expression, without triggering cancer or causing cells to lose their identity, opening a new path toward treating age-related degeneration at its source.

🔬 Brain Implants Without the Wires: Fully implantable brain-computer interfaces that transmit neural signals wirelessly, with no external hardware breaking through the skin, are now being tested in humans, removing the infection risk that has limited every previous generation of these devices and making long-term use far more practical.

🌊 Turning Rock Into a Carbon Sponge: Spreading finely crushed silicate rock across agricultural fields accelerates a natural geological process that pulls CO2 directly out of the atmosphere, while simultaneously improving soil fertility and crop yields, with large-scale trials now underway across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Brazil.

🔭 Using the Universe as Its Own Telescope: Astronomers are using the gravitational fields of massive galaxy clusters as natural lenses to observe galaxies and stars from the first billion years of cosmic time, achieving resolutions that no manufactured telescope could ever match and revealing the universe's earliest structures in extraordinary detail.

🌱 Packaging That Disappears in Weeks: Researchers and companies are converting crop residues including straw, husks, and stalks into fully biodegradable packaging materials that decompose within weeks of disposal, offering a direct replacement for petroleum-based plastics across food supply chains without requiring new agricultural land.

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