A backpack saved a former college football star from homelessness

Happy Tuesday. Sampson James was Indiana University's star running back. His NFL dream ended when his knee gave out. He was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, dropped out and spent eight months homeless in Austin, Texas. He was carrying an IU athletic backpack when a recent IU grad named Jasper Steinmetz spotted it in a park, struck up a conversation and Googled his name. That's today's lead story.

We also have a Hawaiian high schooler who discovered that fungi living on coconut husks can biodegrade both sunscreen and plastic, a baby in Bristol named Macs who is smiling and responding to his parents for the first time since doctors told them to prepare for end of life, and a $1.7 billion solar project being built next to a Texas coal plant.

Dive in.

—Stephanie S

Sampson James was Indiana University's star running back, a player his teammates and coaches expected to make it to the NFL. Then his knee gave out. Then came a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. He dropped out of university, lost his footing, and spent eight months living homeless on the streets of Austin, Texas, carrying his meager possessions in a red Indiana University athletic backpack.

Jasper Steinmetz had just graduated from IU and moved to Austin when he spotted James in a park. The backpack caught his eye. "I saw the Indiana University athletic backpack, and since I had just graduated from Indiana, we had that commonality," Steinmetz said. "I figured, why not talk to him?" He shook James' hand, learned his name, and Googled it. What came back stopped him cold.

Steinmetz set up a GoFundMe that raised $20,000. Former IU teammates contributed. The funds secured James a safe rental apartment, essential clothing, food, and household furniture. "He told me he went to IU as well," James said. "So I was like, wow, that's amazing, go Hoosiers." He told Steinmetz he knew the Hoosier community was counting on him to make the blessing count. He said he wasn't going to let them down.

Macs Green was a healthy baby until he wasn't. Two cardiac arrests led to a diagnosis of dilated cardiomyopathy at Bristol Royal Children's Hospital. His parents, Dylan and Catrin, watched their son placed on an ECMO machine while doctors told them to prepare for the possibility that he might not survive. Then the team introduced them to the Berlin Heart.

The Berlin Heart is a ventricular assist device, an air-powered mechanical pump that takes over the work of a failing heart. It is the only device of its kind approved for babies and children with severe heart failure. First fitted to a European patient in 1990 and an American patient in 2000, the device has since been used in more than 1,500 children worldwide. It bought Macs time.

Since receiving the Berlin Heart, Macs has come off the sedating drugs that kept him still on the ECMO machine. He is smiling. He is responding. "He's a completely different baby," Dylan said. "He's smiling, he's responding to us." Catrin described it as like having their baby back, and said that Macs was "absolutely thriving." He is still on the waiting list for a heart transplant that may take years. Read the full story.

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Vera Wang is a senior at Kaiser High School in East Honolulu. Two years ago, as a sophomore, she started thinking about ocean pollution differently. Sunscreen washes off swimmers and into the water. Microplastics accumulate in marine ecosystems. Conventional filtration systems struggle with both. She decided to build a filter from coconut byproduct waste, inspired by traditional Polynesian weaving, and brought her idea to the lab of Anthony Amend at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

What she found in that lab surprised everyone. The fungi that grow naturally on coconut husks turned out to be capable of biodegrading not just plastic but sunscreen, breaking both down rather than simply trapping them. Using a tannin compound to identify the most promising strains, Wang and graduate student collaborator Kaylee Christensen discovered that some of the fungal species they found had no match in the world's largest gene and genome reference database, suggesting they may be previously uncharacterized species entirely new to science.

At the 2026 Hawaiʻi State Science and Engineering Fair, Wang won first place in Microbiology and the McInerny Foundation scholarship. She has now qualified for the International Science and Engineering Fair in Arizona next May. "This work was made possible because of Vera's vision," said Professor Amend, "and it gives me such optimism about the future of science in Hawaiʻi." Read the full story.

Building new solar at scale requires two things that are expensive and slow to create: land and grid connections. The Twin Oaks coal plant in Robertson, Texas already has both. Panamint Capital, backed by private equity firm KKR, has committed $1.7 billion to build the Big Rooter Power solar-storage complex on adjacent land, leveraging tens of millions of dollars of existing grid infrastructure that would otherwise have to be built from scratch.

The project will deliver 1.2 gigawatts of solar power to the Texas grid in two stages. Stage one brings 491 megawatts online by August 2028. Stage two adds 658 megawatts and 1.6 gigawatts of battery storage by August 2029, along with 20 miles of new high-transmission power lines. A federal investment tax credit worth 50% of project costs makes the economics viable at a scale that would otherwise be difficult to finance.

Big Rooter is part of a growing brownfields-to-solar movement that is converting retired or active fossil fuel sites in Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, and elsewhere into clean energy infrastructure using existing grid connections. The Twin Oaks coal plant itself is not closing, and Panamint is investigating expansion of both the plant and the mine, a complexity worth noting. The solar project, however, is real, it is fully funded, and it is being built.

🔭 Global: Astronomers have released a gallery of 16 stunning images of cosmic gems, including nebulae, star clusters, and galaxies, captured with unprecedented clarity. GNN Science.

💰 USA: A single mother who found herself $25,000 in debt paid it off entirely in just five months by decluttering and selling 410 household items, inspiring thousands to try the same approach. GNN Self-Help.

❤️ Global: The Norwegian NEXAF trial found that a one-year tailored exercise program reduced atrial fibrillation burden by 45% compared to standard care, also cutting AF-related hospitalizations by 46%, with 295 patients followed for one year. ESC Congress 2026.

💉 Global: A University of Oxford study of more than 70,000 people found that Shingrix, the current shingles vaccine, is associated with a 9% lower cardiovascular disease burden over seven years, including a 10% reduction in coronary heart disease and a 12% reduction in heart failure. Published in Nature Medicine.

🌍 Global: The largest blinded randomized trial ever conducted on HPV vaccine dosing confirmed that a single dose provides 97% protection against cancer-causing HPV strains, identical to two doses, a finding that could double vaccination coverage in under-resourced countries using existing supplies. ESCUDDO trial, 20,000+ participants.

On September 8, 1966, Star Trek premiered on NBC with William Shatner as Captain Kirk and Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock. Creator Gene Roddenberry had designed the show as a vehicle for exploring real social questions, using a fictional future to examine race, war, justice, and what humanity might become if it got some things right. The show ran for 79 episodes, was cancelled, and then became one of the most enduring cultural phenomena in the history of television.

The franchise it launched includes multiple television series, twelve feature films, international conventions, and a devoted global community that has never stopped growing. When NASA unveiled its first space shuttle in 1976, they named it Enterprise, after the USS Enterprise from the show. Star Trek did not just imagine the future. For a great many people who went into science, medicine, and engineering, it helped create one.

Other notable September 8 events:

1916: The Van Buren sisters completed their 5,500-mile solo motorcycle ride across America, 110 years ago today, proving women could traverse the continent on Indian motorcycles, becoming the first women to summit Pikes Peak by motor vehicle, and having been arrested multiple times along the way for wearing men's clothes.

1968: Arthur Ashe became the first Black male to win the US Open tennis championship, 58 years ago today, while his brother served an additional tour in Vietnam in his place so he could compete. He remains the only Black man ever to win singles at Wimbledon, the US Open, and the Australian Open.

1504: Michelangelo's David was unveiled in Florence, 522 years ago today, and has been considered one of the greatest works of art in human history ever since.

1930: The first roll of Scotch Tape was sold, 96 years ago today, invented by Dick Drew, a 23-year-old 3M research assistant who noticed auto painters struggling to create clean lines on two-toned cars.

— William James

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:

🧠 Tuning the Brain Without Touching It: Precisely targeted ultrasound beams can now temporarily activate or suppress specific brain circuits without surgery, drugs, or any permanent change, opening new possibilities for treating depression, OCD, chronic pain, and Parkinson's disease by modulating the exact circuits involved rather than altering brain chemistry throughout the whole system.

💡 Computers That Run on Light: Engineers are building photonic computers that process information using light rather than electricity, achieving speeds and energy efficiencies that silicon chips cannot match, with promising early applications in AI inference, telecommunications, and the kind of large-scale scientific simulation that currently requires entire data centers.

🌿 Putting a Price on Coastal Carbon: Scientists and governments are now formally counting the carbon stored in mangroves, seagrasses, and salt marshes in national climate commitments, recognizing these coastal ecosystems as among the most carbon-dense environments on Earth and creating the financial incentives needed to restore them at scale.

🪨 Bringing the Solar System Home: Space agencies have returned physical samples from asteroids to Earth for the first time, with JAXA's Hayabusa2 sample revealing pristine organic molecules and amino acids from the early solar system, and NASA's sample from the asteroid Bennu now under analysis, giving scientists direct access to the building blocks of life as they existed 4.5 billion years ago.

🧬 The Shape of Every Protein: AlphaFold and its successors have now predicted the three-dimensional structure of virtually every protein known to science, a problem that once took years of laboratory work per molecule, and made the entire database freely available to researchers worldwide, unlocking drug discovery and biological understanding at a pace that was previously unimaginable.

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