A dancer lost her body to ALS. Technology gave it back

Happy Wednesday. We made it to the middle of the week, which honestly deserves more credit than it gets.

Today's lead story is about a dancer named Breanna who was diagnosed with ALS and found a way back to the stage that nobody could have predicted. It involves brain interface technology, an avatar, and a theater in Amsterdam, and it genuinely made me catch my breath when I read it.

We've also got Jamaica doing something remarkable with community trust, conservationists in South Africa winning a quiet battle for some of the rarest creatures on earth, and an offshore wind turbine that is pulling double duty in a way that is either genius or completely wild, maybe both.

Let's dive in.

—Stephanie S

Happy Wednesday. We made it to the middle of the week, which honestly deserves more credit than it gets.

Today's lead story is about a dancer named Breanna who was diagnosed with ALS and found a way back to the stage that nobody could have predicted. It involves brain interface technology, an avatar, and a theater in Amsterdam, and it genuinely made me catch my breath when I read it.

We've also got Jamaica doing something remarkable with community trust, conservationists in South Africa winning a quiet battle for some of the rarest creatures on earth, and an offshore wind turbine that is pulling double duty in a way that is either genius or completely wild, maybe both.

Let's dive in.

—Stephanie S

👉 P.S. We pour a lot of love into finding and writing these stories every day. If Good News Break means something to you, you can support us for just $5 a month and help us keep going.

Breanna Olson spent years training to become a professional dancer. Then ALS began taking that away from her, the way it takes everything, slowly and without mercy, until she was in a wheelchair and the stage felt like another lifetime. What happened next is the kind of thing that makes you grateful technology exists at all.

A lab called Dentsu Lab, part of the Japanese conglomerate Dentsu, invited Breanna to join a project called Waves of Will, which used brain interface technology to give people living with disabilities back their personal expression. The system works through an EEG headset that reads Breanna's brain activity as she imagines specific movements in precise detail. Those signals are translated into instructions for a digital avatar, which then performs the movement on stage in real time. The focus required is extraordinary. The result is something else entirely.

In December, at the OBA Theater in Amsterdam, Breanna and her avatar performed together in what Dentsu Lab called the first performance of its kind anywhere in the world. She said she never dreamed she would dance on stage again. That it was beautiful. That she will remember it for the rest of her life.

There is a video. Watch it and try not to feel something.

Jamaica has long carried one of the highest murder rates in the world. In 2024, there were over 1,100 homicides. So when 2025 came in at 673, the first time since 1993 that the annual total fell below 700, it wasn't just a statistic. It was a turning point worth paying attention to.

What drove it wasn't a crackdown. It was tip-offs. Police tips increased by 94% last year, and the vast majority came in without any request for the reward money that was on offer. Jamaica's Minister of National Security Dr. Horace Chang addressed parliament about it and put it plainly: this is not about money. It is about patriotism. It is about citizens deciding to stand up for their communities.

Enhanced border and port controls that intercepted illicit firearms also played a significant role. But the human element, neighbors choosing to speak up, is what made the difference feel different this time. Read the full story and the minister's remarks.

Invasive species cost the African continent $65 billion a year in damage to crops, fisheries, livestock, and eco-tourism. Between 2017 and 2025, a coalition of groups working under the IUCN took on three of the most stubborn infestations in South Africa's Western Cape, and won.

In the Klein Swartberg Mountains, invasive maritime pine trees were draining the wetlands that the Critically Endangered rough moss frog depended on to survive. Conservationists used a controlled burn to eliminate the pines across 8,500 acres. Post-burn surveys then uncovered six previously unknown subpopulations of the frog. Nobody knew they were there until the trees were gone.

In Cape Town's Tokai Park, teams manually cleared invasive Eucalyptus and Acacia trees and planted 4,500 native seedlings, resulting in a 22% decrease in invasive vegetation and a 28% recovery of native plants. And in the Biedouw River, a rescue, rear, and release program for South Africa's most endangered freshwater fish, the Clanwilliam sandfish, helped spawning populations more than double in a single year. Three ecosystems. Three wins.

The full story is worth the read.

Data centers are one of the fastest growing energy problems on the planet. In the US alone they consume 75 gigawatt hours of electricity annually, a figure expected to nearly double by the end of the decade as AI computing demands surge. They also require enormous amounts of land, cooling power, and community approval, which is getting harder to come by.

A wind power company called Aikido thinks it has found a way around all of that. Their prototype turbine, set for deployment in the North Sea in 2027, hosts a 12-megawatt data center inside its ballast tanks. The wind generates the power. The cold ocean water disperses the heat. No land, no grid, no neighbors to upset.

As Aikido's CEO Sam Kanner put it: we have the power from the wind, we have free cooling, and we think we can be quite cost competitive compared to conventional data center solutions. If the prototype works, a full-scale version could be deployed as early as 2028. Read the full story including one even wilder idea involving outer space.

🚀 USA: Four astronauts aboard NASA's Artemis II splashed down safely after a historic 10-day mission around the Moon, breaking the 55-year-old human spaceflight distance record set by Apollo 13 and marking the first crewed lunar mission since 1972.

🐠 Ghana: After more than 15 years of scientific research and community consultation, Ghana declared its first ever Marine Protected Area at Greater Cape Three Points, covering 700 square kilometers of ocean that supports 21 coastal communities and serves as a critical nursery ground for the country's most important fish species

♳ Global: Scientists have engineered a special strain of algae that removes microplastics from drinking water almost like a magnet, producing a natural compound that binds to water-repelling plastic particles and pulls them out of the water supply.

💻 Germany: Scientists using Europe's new JUPITER exascale supercomputer broke the world record for quantum simulation, fully simulating a 50-qubit quantum computer for the first time ever, shattering the previous 48-qubit record and opening new doors for quantum computing research.

🩸UK: Researchers at Imperial College London developed a blood test that can predict how diseases will progress in patients and how they will respond to treatment, successfully tested across a range of conditions including infectious diseases and inflammatory bowel disease.

Stevie Wonder was born blind. At age 11 he signed with Motown Records. By the time most people his age were learning to drive, he had already recorded songs that would outlast generations. What followed was one of the most extraordinary careers in the history of popular music, 30 top-ten hits in the US, 25 Grammy Awards, the most ever awarded to a male solo artist, and a catalogue that includes Superstition, Signed Sealed Delivered, My Cherie Amour, and I Wish, songs that feel less like recordings and more like shared memories.

He turns 75 today, and he is still going. What is easy to forget, given how naturally his talent seems to flow, is that none of it was inevitable. He was born six weeks premature, and the excess oxygen in his incubator left him permanently blind. He could have been defined entirely by that. Instead he became someone whose music makes people feel seen.

Other notable May 13 events:

1888: Brazil abolished slavery with the passage of the Lei Áurea, the Golden Law, becoming the last country in the Western Hemisphere to do so and freeing an estimated 700,000 people.

1909: The inaugural Giro d'Italia was held, with cyclists racing 1,200 miles across Italy in 21 stages, launching what would become one of the most prestigious cycling races in the world.

1914: The US Congress established Mother's Day as an official holiday, to be observed on the second Sunday of May each year.

1958: Ben Carlin completed the first and still only circumnavigation of the Earth in an amphibious vehicle, traveling over 11,000 miles by sea and 39,000 miles by land across 38 countries over ten years.

— We all have ability. The difference is how we use it

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:

🦮 Guide Dog Revolution: Modern guide dogs are now trained to navigate complex urban environments including escalators, revolving doors, and subway systems, giving blind and visually impaired people a level of independence that was unimaginable just 50 years ago.

🌾 Feeding the World: Global hunger has fallen by nearly 50% since 1990 despite the world's population growing by 2.5 billion people, a feat achieved through advances in agricultural science, crop yields, and food distribution.

🩻 Medical Imaging: MRI and CT scanning technology, which didn't exist before the 1970s, now allows doctors to see inside the human body without a single incision, making conditions that were once routinely fatal now routinely treatable.

⚡ Battery Revolution: The cost of lithium-ion batteries has fallen by 97% since 1991, making electric vehicles, grid-scale energy storage, and renewable power economically viable in ways that would have seemed impossible a generation ago.

🛜 The Internet of Good: Over 5.4 billion people now have access to the internet, connecting the majority of humanity to knowledge, opportunity, and each other in ways that have compressed decades of human progress into years.

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