A 99-year-old woman broke four ribs and still showed up to throw the first pitch

Happy Thursday. If you caught any of the Perseid meteor shower last night, I hope it was worth staying up for. Today's lead story is about Maybelle Blair, who played professional baseball in 1948, inspired a character in A League of Their Own, and last week showed up in a wheelchair with four broken ribs to throw the first pitch at the return of women's pro baseball. She's 99.

We also have the Great Barrier Reef getting a monsoon reprieve after six bleaching events in a decade, a Brown University student spending his summer teaching immigrant teens English at a Providence library, and a fishing guide who called 911 for an entangled manatee while her calf watched from a few feet away.

Dive in.

—Stephanie S

Maybelle Blair pitched for the Peoria Redwings in 1948, in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, the real-life league that inspired the 1992 film A League of Their Own. She is the woman who inspired the character Mae Mordabito, played by Madonna. She is 99 years old. And last week, in a wheelchair, with four broken ribs, she was on the field in Springfield, Illinois, for the first game of the new Women's Professional Baseball League.

"I tell you, I broke four ribs recently," she told a news crew. "But nothing was going to stop me from being here — even if I had to crawl."

The WPBL threw out its first pitch on August 1, 72 years after the original league was disbanded in 1954. Springfield, which once had a franchise in the original league, was chosen to host all four city teams. The league mascot is named Maybelle, after her. She is an honorary member of its advisory board, and she threw the ceremonial first pitch before the inaugural game between the LA Queens and the NY Heights.

In that first game, New York's Denae Benites hit the league's first home run, went four-for-four at the plate, and added three stolen bases. The Queens rallied for four runs in the final inning to win. Japanese pitcher Ayami Sato, Mo'ne Davis — the first girl to throw a Little League World Series shutout — and dozens of other athletes are finally playing on the stage they always deserved. "This is the happiest day of my life," Maybelle said. There is a video. Watch it here.

Before the 1990s, mass coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef was exceptionally rare. Since 2016, there have been six of them. Warming oceans push water temperatures past the threshold corals can survive, causing them to expel their algae and turn white. If heat stress lasts long enough, the coral dies. The world's largest coral system, stretching 1,400 miles along Australia's northeastern coast, has been under sustained pressure for a decade.

This year, the monsoon arrived at the right moment. Increased cloud cover and cooler sea temperatures limited the severity and extent of bleaching during the summer, according to the Australian Institute of Marine Science's 40th annual monitoring report. Of 121 coral reefs surveyed, 106 had moderate to high coral cover, and only three had cover below 10%. Coral cover grew by 16.7% in the Northern Region and by 10.2% in the Central Region compared to last year.

"We did not see a repeat of the 2024 and 2025 mass bleaching events," said Dr. Mike Emslie, who leads the program. All three regions continue to sit at or near their long-term average cover levels — a sign of resilience, even if a fragile one. "While the Reef is showing resilience, it is being pushed and its capacity to recover is limited." Read the full story.

Justin Dunn is a rising sophomore at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. This summer, through the university's SPRINT-iProv fellowship, he is one of 40 Brown undergraduates placed full-time with local nonprofits across the city. His placement: teaching intermediate English to immigrant teenagers at the Providence Public Library.

The class runs four weeks. There are vocabulary games, journal entries, and lessons on everything from food to outer space to employment. But what makes Justin's approach different is that he takes the classroom out into the city. When the class studied food and shopping, he brought his students to a nearby Maruichi market to practice speaking English with a cashier. He helped them build their own résumés, learning the words and phrases needed to describe their education and experience. "For teens who may soon be looking for jobs, becoming comfortable with that language can be really helpful," he said.

Something else happened along the way. Some of the library staff, Justin discovered, are themselves immigrants who first came through the library's English-language programs before eventually being hired there. The same doors his students are walking through now, others once walked through too. "There's a real sense of community here," he said, "and I love that I get to be part of it." Read the full story.

As a new school year begins, millions of students arrive carrying worries their teachers can't always see. Research is clear: children who have one caring adult who believes in them are more likely to succeed in school and in life. But a third of kids never get that person.

CricketTogether, from Cricket Media, the home of award-winning children's magazines for over 50 years, pairs volunteer eMentors with students through 1-2 short online letters per month, supervised, simple, and surprisingly powerful. Studies show the combination of authentic writing and a sustained relationship with a caring adult produces measurable improvements in literacy and engagement.

All it takes is a computer and 30 minutes a month. If your company sponsors a classroom, you can give a child the thing they need most: someone in their corner. Learn how your workplace can get involved.

On July 29, fishing guide Capt. Davis Galland got a call about a manatee entangled in crab trap lines in the Mackay River off St. Simons Island, Georgia. He reported it immediately, describing it as the first time such a thing had ever been reported in the state. The animal, a 1,000-pound federally protected female, was wrapped tightly in the line and buoy from a commercial crab pot. A small calf stayed close throughout.

What followed required three boats, five organizations, and two days. The Georgia Department of Natural Resources, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, US Fish and Wildlife Service, Clearwater Marine Aquarium Research Institute, and two additional rescue groups coordinated a multi-state response. On the first attempt, the team freed the manatee from the anchoring crab trap before a storm pushed them off the water. They returned the next day and manually cut away the remaining line and buoy, which was beginning to cut into her skin. They also attached a satellite tracking tag before she swam away.

"Because of this impressive team response, this female manatee and what appeared to be a dependent calf have a chance to thrive and contribute to the wild population for years to come," said Terri Calleson of the US Fish and Wildlife Service. "Manatee rescues truly take a village," she added, "whether rendering emergency aid or working collaboratively toward species recovery." Read the full story.

🏰 UK: A forgotten fragment of a papal letter found in the Vatican archives suggests that King Harold may have lost England in 1066 partly because he backed the wrong pope during a bitter church schism, giving Pope Alexander II political motivation to bless William's invasion as a "just war." University of East Anglia, published in a new Yale University Press book.

🦤 Global: CT scans of the world's only two complete dodo skulls reveal that the famously "dumb" dodo was actually far more complex than its reputation suggests, with enhanced smell, a highly sensitive beak, and possible dawn-to-dusk vision, overturning centuries of caricature. University of Lethbridge, published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.

☀️ UK: Solar energy provided a record 14.4% of all UK electricity in July 2026, generating 3.2 terawatt-hours and smashing the previous monthly record of 12.4%, with more new rooftop solar installations in H1 2026 than any six-month period since 2011.

🦴 UK: A bisphosphonate drug already approved for osteoporosis blocked the mineral buildup that fuses and hardens spinal discs in zebrafish carrying a collagen gene defect, opening promising new avenues for treating disc degeneration, a condition for which surgery remains the only current long-term option. Universities of Edinburgh and Bristol, published in Communications Biology.

🌙 Germany: A double-blind trial of 171 PTSD patients found that prescription dronabinol, a cannabis-derived THC medication, eliminated trauma-related nightmares completely for more than one in three participants after ten weeks, with another 21% reporting their nightmares at least halved. Charité Berlin, published in Nature Medicine.

On August 13, 1964, A Hard Day's Night opened in cinemas across the United States to immediate critical and commercial acclaim. Directed by Richard Lester and starring all four Beatles, the film followed a fictionalized 36 hours in the band's life and was shot in a style that felt genuinely unlike anything audiences had seen before. Critics called it a "comedic Fantasia with music." TIME Magazine later named it one of the 100 greatest films of all time. It was nominated for two Academy Awards, including Best Original Screenplay.

What makes the film significant beyond its entertainment value is its influence. A Hard Day's Night introduced or popularized techniques that became the entire visual vocabulary of modern music and film: cutting images to the beat of the music, hand-held cameras, quick intercutting between scenes, and music playing under documentary-style footage. According to British critic Leslie Halliwell, it "led directly to all the kaleidoscopic swinging London spy thrillers and comedies of the later sixties." You can trace a direct line from this film to MTV, to every music video ever made, to the visual style of countless films and television shows that followed.

Other notable August 13 events:

1905: Norway voted to end its union with Sweden, 121 years ago today, with more than 350,000 citizens voting to leave and only 184 voting to remain. Prince Carl of Denmark was elected as Norway's new king, taking the throne as Haakon VII, the country's first independent monarch in over five centuries.

1913: Harry Brearley produced the first true stainless steel in Sheffield, England, 113 years ago today, by adding chromium to a steel alloy and creating a metal that would rarely corrode, rust, or stain, transforming manufacturing, medicine, and daily life across the following century.

2008: Michael Phelps won the men's 200-meter butterfly in Beijing, 18 years ago today, setting the all-time Olympic record for most gold medals by an individual athlete. Diagnosed with severe ADHD as a child, told by a teacher he would never be successful, he finished his Olympic career with 28 medals, 23 of them gold.

1989: The Moscow Music Peace Festival was held in Lenin Stadium, 37 years ago today, featuring Motley Crue, Ozzy Osbourne, Bon Jovi, and the Scorpions, marking the first concert ever held in the Soviet Union where the audience was permitted to stand up and dance rather than remain seated.

— Benjamin Franklin

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:

🧬 Reading the Book of Life at Birth: National programs are testing whether sequencing a newborn's complete genome at birth and storing it for comparison throughout their life could allow doctors to identify hundreds of genetic conditions before they cause harm, transforming medicine from reactive treatment to early prevention.

🔬 Beyond Silicon: Carbon nanotube transistors are now outperforming silicon in laboratory settings, offering a potential path past the physical limits that silicon chip manufacturing is approaching, and enabling computers that could be dramatically faster and more energy efficient than anything currently possible.

🌊 Eyes Across the Ocean: Fleets of solar-powered autonomous surface vehicles and underwater gliders are continuously monitoring ocean chemistry, temperature, and biodiversity across vast stretches of ocean that were previously sampled only a few times per decade, giving scientists a real-time picture of how the seas are changing.

🔭 A New Cosmic Ruler: Gravitational wave detectors are now being used alongside traditional telescopes to independently measure how fast the universe is expanding, offering a potential way to resolve the longstanding disagreement between two conflicting methods that has puzzled cosmologists for years.

🌱 Farming the Salt Flats: Agricultural scientists have bred and engineered varieties of rice, wheat, and tomatoes that can grow in saline soils and with brackish irrigation water, potentially opening hundreds of millions of acres of currently unusable coastal and arid land to food production worldwide.

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