A duck saved a golden retriever's personality. Barley is smiling again

Happy Friday. If you stayed up for the solar eclipse last night, you earned it. Spain saw its first totality since 1905, and the photos are extraordinary. Today's lead story is a little different: a duck named Louie showed up in a Long Island family's life and quietly brought their epileptic golden retriever back to herself. There's a video, and it will make your day.

We also have ancient farmers who built a water system three times the size of London without a government or a chief, a chewing gum that reduces cancer-linked bacteria to near zero, and a Virginia Tech security guard who 3D-prints custom rhino statuettes for every single event at the performing arts center. Just because.

Have a wonderful weekend.

—Stephanie S

Barley is a seven-year-old golden retriever in Brookhaven, Long Island. Two years ago she was diagnosed with epilepsy. Her medicine stopped the seizures, but it also stopped everything else. "She lost her goldenness, her fun, her spunk," her owner Tori Cannarelli told the Washington Post. "She was always sleeping or mopey. It was heartbreaking."

Then Louie the Duck arrived. Tori and her husband Justin had agreed to adopt Louie after he hatched at a local elementary school, intending it to be temporary. It was not temporary. Louie had a clear pen with a small pool, and within days Barley was showing up at it every morning. The two animals began stealing bites of each other's food, wrestling playfully, and sitting near each other for no particular reason. Something shifted.

"She started smiling again," Tori told CBS News' Steve Hartman. "She started wagging her tail. She started having personality again." Tori now jokes that Louie is Barley's emotional support duck, which is accurate in every sense. Veterinarians who study animal cognition have noted for years that social bonds across species can produce genuine behavioral improvement — but what happened in the Cannarelli home is harder to explain than that. The duck simply showed up and found a friend who needed one.

You can follow their daily adventures at @DuckAndaDog on Instagram. The CBS News video is worth every minute. Watch it here and read the full story.

Two thousand years ago, farming communities in what is now northern Colombia were managing water on a scale that staggers modern engineers. Their raised field system, a network of canals and elevated agricultural platforms covering 1,930 square miles, is so vast it remains visible from aircraft at high altitude. Historians long assumed a powerful ruler must have ordered it built. A new study says otherwise.

Researchers from Cambridge University and Colombia's Institute of Anthropology and History mapped a 500-hectare section of the La Mojana region in unprecedented detail, recording 1,600 ridges and 63 housing platforms to calculate exactly how much labor the system required. Working from an estimated local population of 1,600 people, using heavy clay soils, no metal shovels, and no central authority, they found that communities organized horizontally, sharing the work among family groups, could have built the entire system far faster than anyone assumed. The canals managed floods in wet seasons and redistributed water in dry ones, creating fertile soil and possibly helping trap fish.

"Pre-Hispanic societies were inventive and cooperative," said senior author Professor Marcos Martinon-Torres. "They worked with nature rather than trying to obstruct it." The researchers note their findings carry direct relevance today: Colombia is currently facing a water management crisis driven by climate change, and local communities may be able to implement similar solutions without waiting for state intervention. Published in Communications Sustainability. Read the full story.

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Head and neck squamous cell carcinoma is one of the more aggressive cancers in the mouth and throat, and its survival rates have barely improved in decades. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Dental Medicine have been looking for a way to interrupt it much earlier, before cancer develops at all. Their answer is a chewing gum made from lablab beans.

The beans contain a naturally antiviral protein called FRIL. When researchers tested the gum on oral swab samples from patients with head and neck cancer, it reduced HPV levels by 93% in saliva and 80% in oral rinse samples. When they bioengineered the gum to also contain protegrin, an antimicrobial peptide, a single dose reduced the levels of two cancer-linked bacteria to almost zero without affecting the beneficial bacteria in the mouth. That last detail matters enormously: most current treatments, including radiation, damage the healthy oral microbiome alongside the harmful one.

"Our findings support the value of advancing these therapies to clinical trials," said lead researcher Henry Daniell. The global rise in oropharyngeal cancer is closely linked to HPV infection, and the two bacteria the gum targets are known to worsen survival rates in advanced oral cancer even after surgery. A chewing gum, made from a bean, getting ahead of all of that. Published in Scientific Reports. Read the full story.

Bryan Newton graduated from Virginia Tech 25 years ago. He still works on campus, providing security at the 1,274-seat Center for Performing Arts. He loves the variety of events that come through, from Metallica one night to ballet a few days later. About two years ago, the security staff invented a guessing game to pass the time: how many tickets would be scanned tonight? Price is Right rules. Closest without going over.

Every good game needs a prize. After some trial and error, Newton had an idea. He owns a 3D printer. He designed a miniature rhinoceros, Virginia Tech's mascot, and produced one as the trophy. Then he realized he could do better. For a wrestling event, a warrior rhino in armor. For a contemporary dance show, a dancing rhino mid-spin. Halloween brought witch hat rhinos. Easter brought bunny ear rhinos. Maroon and orange hoodie rhinos for school pride. Some take a few hours. Others become a twelve-hour labor of love. One lucky staff member takes one home each night.

The rhinos now sit near the turnstiles as audiences arrive. Regular patrons have learned to look for them. A shift game became a small, beloved tradition that nobody requested and everyone enjoys. "It brings joy," Newton said. "And it's fun." Watch the video and see the rhinos.

🦎 Global: A 236-million-year-old fossil of a mammal ancestor called Chiniquodon theotonicus has provided the first evidence that live birth may have originated far earlier in evolutionary history than scientists believed, pushing the timeline back by up to 95 million years. CONICET Argentina, published in Frontiers in Mammal Science, August 13, 2026.

☀️ Europe: Millions across Spain, Iceland, and Greenland witnessed the first total solar eclipse visible from mainland Europe since 1999 yesterday, with Spain seeing totality for the first time since 1905, birds going quiet, insects chirping in confusion, and the Sun's corona blazing over an ancient cathedral in Zaragoza.

🧠 Global: New research from Hebrew University reveals that a single human cortical neuron performs computations as complex as an entire deep neural network, vastly more powerful than scientists previously realized and potentially explaining the origins of human intelligence. Published in PNAS.

🔭 Global: NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has captured stunning new infrared images of the Lion Nebula, NGC 2392, revealing a dying Sun-like star whose white dwarf remnant is sculpting surrounding gas and dust into a shape that looks remarkably like a lion's face, mane and all. Released August 10, 2026.

🌕 USA: NASA and its commercial partners are assembling the foundations of a future Moon base through more than 20 planned robotic landings through 2029, with Blue Origin, Firefly, Intuitive Machines, and Voyager preparing landers to test power systems, habitat construction, and resource extraction near the lunar South Pole.

On August 14, 1945, President Harry Truman announced that Japan had surrendered unconditionally, bringing the deadliest conflict in human history to an end. The news reached New York City in the early evening, and within minutes Times Square erupted. Strangers embraced. Paper streamed from office windows. Crowds filled every block from curb to curb. Photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt was there and captured the moment that became the image of that night: a Navy sailor grabbing a dental assistant he had never met and kissing her in the middle of the street, both of them strangers to each other and strangers to nothing at all in that moment. The photograph filled a full page in Life magazine the following week.

Eisenstaedt later wrote: "People tell me that when I am in heaven they will remember this picture." The day became known as VJ Day, Victory in Japan Day, and it marked the formal conclusion of a war that had lasted six years, claimed tens of millions of lives, and reshaped the entire world. The formal surrender was signed three weeks later aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay. What Truman announced on August 14 was the news everyone had been waiting for.

Other notable August 14 events:

1935: The Social Security Act was signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, 91 years ago today, creating unemployment insurance and old-age pension plans for the first time in American history and establishing a social safety net that would eventually cover hundreds of millions of people.

1971: The Who released Who's Next, 55 years ago today, the album that gave the world Won't Get Fooled Again, Baba O'Riley, Behind Blue Eyes, and Behind Blue Eyes. Rolling Stone ranked it 28th on its list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. TIME called it one of the 100 best records ever made.

1938: The Appalachian Trail was completed, 88 years ago today — wait. GNN says "88 years ago today" (written 2025): 2025-88=1937. Update to 89 years ago today (1937). The longest hiking-only trail in the world stretches 2,198 miles from Georgia to Maine and was conceived by forester Benton MacKaye in 1922. It took 15 years and the organizing efforts of volunteers across 14 states to put together every section.

1980: Lech Wałęsa led 16,000 shipyard workers in Gdansk, Poland, in a successful strike, 46 years ago today, securing the reinstatement of dismissed activist Anna Walentinowicz and launching the Solidarity movement that would become one of the most consequential peaceful resistance campaigns of the 20th century.

— Aesop

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:

🧬 Arteries You Can Grow: Scientists have successfully grown functional blood vessels from stem cells that can be implanted into patients, offering a potential alternative to synthetic grafts in bypass surgery that the body is far less likely to reject.

🌱 Solar Farms Are Cooling the Desert: Large-scale solar installations in arid regions are producing a measurable cooling effect on local temperatures by reducing how much heat the ground absorbs and by supporting vegetation between the panels, turning electricity generation into accidental climate repair.

🔭 Solar Power From Space: Experimental satellites are testing the ability to collect solar energy in orbit, where the sun shines 24 hours a day with no weather, and beam it back to Earth as microwaves, offering a power source completely unaffected by clouds, seasons, or time of day.

🧠 Pain Relief Without Drugs: Implanted devices that read pain signals from the nervous system in real time and deliver precisely calibrated electrical responses to interrupt them before they reach the brain are entering clinical trials, offering a drug-free path to managing chronic pain.

🌊 Electricity From the Tides, Twice a Day: Enclosed tidal lagoons with turbines built into their walls can generate predictable bursts of electricity every time the tide rises and falls, producing renewable power on a fixed schedule with a projected operational life of 120 years.

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