A construction worker in Belgium just hit a gold bar with his jackhammer

Happy Wednesday. Today is the 187th anniversary of the day Louis Daguerre gave photography to the world for free, patent-free, with instructions. Which feels like the right spirit for a newsletter about good news. Today's lead story is about a part-time construction worker in Belgium who hit something with his jackhammer and thought he'd found a euro coin. He had not found a euro coin.

We also have a study showing cement kilns could actually remove carbon from the atmosphere rather than add it, a humble desert plant that may be able to replace trees in paper products entirely, and a tiny amber-listed songbird in Leicestershire who got custom cardboard foot casts after being hit by a car.

Here's your good news.

—Stephanie S

Kobe Phillips is a student working part-time on a demolition crew in Dendermonde, a small city about 19 miles outside Brussels. Last week his crew was breaking up the floor of an old brewery when coins started appearing in the hole beneath him. He thought they were 1-euro coins, called a colleague over to help dig them out, and then noticed a small gold bar stuck to the end of his jackhammer.

When the full scope became clear, the crew called the property owner, who called the police. The East Flanders Public Prosecutor's Office took everything into custody and moved it to a secure undisclosed location pending an investigation into provenance and ownership. The final tally: 40 gold bars and more than 4,000 gold sovereign coins, estimated at approximately $10 million.

"I thought they were one-euro coins, neatly lined up in a row," Phillips told Belgian broadcaster VTM. "We dug them out, and then we saw a small bar of gold lying there, already attached to our digging hammer. There was actually a bit more than we'd thought."

Most of the bars date to the 1960s. Several people have already contacted authorities with proof of ownership documentation. The brewery floor, it turns out, had been keeping a secret for decades. Read the full story.

Cement production is one of the world's largest sources of industrial CO2, generating around 4 billion metric tons per year. Most of that comes from heating limestone, the core raw material in cement, which releases CO2 as it breaks down. A new study from ETH Zurich found that this same process, run on clean electricity, could be flipped from a source of emissions into a tool for removing them.

The key insight is that calcium looping, a direct air capture method used by US company Heirloom Carbon Technologies, works almost identically to cement production. Both rely on heating limestone to separate CO2 and quicklime. When the quicklime is later mixed with water, it reabsorbs CO2 from the atmosphere and converts back into limestone, ready to be reused.

PhD student Vittoria Bolognaro, who led the research, found that running kilns electrically rather than on fossil fuels could cancel 78% of cement's carbon emissions, with net-negative removal efficiency of 85-96% achievable by 2050 depending on the energy mix. "From a climate perspective, the combination of DAC and cement production is very promising," she said. Read the full story.

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Hesperaloe funifera is a spiky succulent native to the Chihuahuan Desert, the kind of plant that thrives precisely where trees cannot. Startup Fiber Resources Inc. believes it could replace trees entirely in paper products, from toilet paper to cardboard, and has signed research agreements with Procter & Gamble and Kimberley-Clark to test that idea at scale.

The numbers are striking. Hesperaloe produces 2.3 times more usable fiber per acre per year than pine trees, can be harvested in 4-5 years rather than 30+, and requires no irrigation, fertilizer, or pesticides to grow. Its fiber characteristics are similar to hardwood, meaning it can slot directly into existing paper manufacturing processes without major retooling.

CEO Nathan Sherrill calls it a "moonshot" — but the corporate partners suggest it's one worth taking seriously. Hesperaloe sequesters CO2 while it grows and requires no deforestation to harvest. Read the full story.

A common whitethroat, a small migratory songbird listed as amber on the UK's conservation concern list, was found lying stunned in a road in Leicestershire last Saturday after being struck by a car. The couple who found him called the Leicestershire Wildlife Hospital, where staff discovered his feet were curled and unable to grip due to nerve or ligament damage.

Amy Blower, who works at the hospital, fashioned a pair of tiny casts from cardboard, cotton wool, and micropore tape. "We put a little bit of cotton wool between the feet and the cardboard to add a bit of cushioning and then use micropore tape to secure them," she said. It's a technique the hospital has used before with baby birds recovering from nutritional deficiencies, though not usually for an adult car-strike victim.

He's making good progress. Staff expect to release him in a matter of days, well before he needs to begin his autumn migration back to Africa. See the photo and read the full story.

🌊 Pacific: Chile and its indigenous Rapa Nui people have agreed to create a 270,000-square-mile ocean reserve around Easter Island, to be managed by the island's own community, making it one of the largest exclusively indigenous-managed marine protected areas ever established.

🪜 Global: A meta-analysis of nine studies and 480,000 people found that regular stair climbers were 39% less likely to die from cardiovascular disease and 24% less likely to die from any cause, with even six flights per day linked to measurable benefits. University of East Anglia, published in American Journal of Cardiovascular Drugs.

💊 Global: Three studies from UMCG cardiologists found that low-dose digoxin, a centuries-old drug costing less than ten cents a day, reduces heart failure hospitalizations by around 25% when added to standard treatment, potentially paving the way for its return to mainstream guidelines. Published in Nature Medicine and JAMA.

🔭 Global: By studying a spiral galaxy nicknamed the "Saguaro," astronomers have proposed an explanation for Webb's mysterious "little red dots" — a temporary phase of highly active supermassive black holes whose surrounding galaxies simply fade beyond detection at enormous distances. Published in The Astrophysical Journal.

🧠 Global: A randomized clinical trial found that imagery-based therapy that revisits and rewrites painful childhood memories of criticism produced lasting reductions in fear of failure, guilt, and physiological stress in young adults, with the improvements holding steady at both three-month and six-month follow-ups. SWPS University Poland, published in Frontiers in Psychology.

On August 19, 1839, the French artist and inventor Louis Daguerre presented his photographic process to the world entirely patent-free, with detailed instructions on how to replicate it. He didn't have to do that. He chose to. The French government had purchased the rights and declared the daguerreotype a gift to all humanity, and on that day Daguerre's method for fixing light onto a copper plate became available to anyone who wanted it. Within weeks, photographers were working in cities across Europe and beyond.

The daguerreotype produced images of extraordinary detail on silver-coated copper sheets, each one a mirror-like original with no negative and no copy. Upon seeing a finished image for the first time, Daguerre wrote: "I have seized the light, I have arrested its flight!" The process required ten-minute exposures at first, but he soon discovered that a shorter exposure could produce a latent image that could be chemically developed into a full photograph. Every image ever made, every portrait, every news photo, every family snapshot — exists in some form because of what he shared freely on this day.

Other notable August 19 events:

1964: Syncom 3, the first geostationary communications satellite, was launched, 62 years ago today, enabling live television coverage of the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, the first time audiences around the world watched the same event simultaneously in real time.

1964: The Beatles launched their first North American tour, 62 years ago today, with the stipulation that the band would refuse to perform at any venue that excluded African Americans, making integration a condition of their contract at a moment when that was not standard practice.

1944: The Liberation of Paris commenced, 82 years ago today, as French resistance fighters rose up against German occupation while Allied forces advanced from the west, beginning the end of four years of Nazi control of the French capital.

1962: American golfer Homero Blancas shot a round of 55 at a college tournament in Longview, Texas, 64 years ago today, with 13 birdies and one eagle on a par-70 course, setting a record for the lowest competitive round in the history of golf that has never been broken.

— Jane Goodall

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:

🧬 Blood You Can Grow in a Lab: Researchers are now producing functional red blood cells, platelets, and immune cells entirely from stem cells in bioreactors, with the potential to eliminate donor blood shortages and create universal blood products free from the risk of transfusion-transmitted infection.

🔬 Medicines That Speak the Language of Your Cells: A new generation of programmable RNA medicines can silence, activate, or modify virtually any gene in the body with a precision and reversibility that permanent gene editing cannot match, opening potential treatments for hundreds of conditions without altering DNA at all.

🔭 Sensors That Feel Gravity: Devices that exploit quantum superposition to measure gravitational fields, magnetic fields, and acceleration with extraordinary precision are now entering commercial development, with applications ranging from navigation systems that work without GPS to medical scanners and underground mineral surveys.

🧬 Surgery Inside Your Gut Microbiome: Scientists have developed high-resolution tools that can edit specific bacteria in the gut microbiome without disturbing neighboring species, offering targeted treatments for inflammatory bowel disease and other conditions that currently have no precise medical solution.

🌊 Wind Power From the Deep Ocean: Wind turbines mounted on floating platforms anchored to the deep ocean floor are now being deployed commercially off the coasts of Norway and Scotland, opening the vast wind energy resources of deep water that fixed-bottom turbines simply cannot reach.

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