A homeless man played piano in a church on a cold night, went viral and has now raised $54,000 for homeless charities

Happy Monday. Two years ago a homeless man walked into a church on a cold night in Cornwall and asked if he could use the piano. What happened next is today's lead story.

We also have a 22-year-old in Nairobi who built robotic hands from recycled plastic that translate a teacher's voice into sign language for deaf students, new research showing elephants can pause an impulse and choose a more rational course of action, and a hotel in Sicily that gave a lost stuffed bear a five-day VIP vacation before mailing it home with a letter.

Good week ahead.

—Stephanie S

Rhys Wynne-Jones had been homeless for a decade in England when he sought refuge one January night at St. Mary's Church in Penzance, Cornwall, one of Britain's Night Churches that remain open around the clock for vulnerable people. After speaking with volunteers, the 34-year-old asked if he could use the piano. Music had been his lifelong coping mechanism. "There is a lot of noise in my head," he said, "but when I play piano my head goes quiet. I feel calm."

He played a rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody. Volunteers and visitors gathered around him. A volunteer posted a video to Facebook, where it spread rapidly, with hundreds of comments asking who this young man was. He became known as The Nightchurch Pianist. After coming forward, he was invited to perform at a charity gig alongside Ronnie Wood, Peter Andre, and the cast of EastEnders. He secured a place to live through Coastline Housing in west Cornwall, and has since collaborated with Peter Andre on a television pilot, with a theatre production in Bristol upcoming.

His act has its own distinctive touches. He recites all the countries of the world, all the elements of the periodic table, and the first 100 digits of Pi. "I don't see myself as a professional pianist or a celebrity figure," he said. "I just love to play the piano to raise money for homeless charities and good causes." In the 30 months since that night in Penzance, he has raised more than £40,000 for charity.

"The pain doesn't end just because you've got a key," he added. But the music still makes his head go quiet.

Three hundred thousand children in Kenya are deaf or hearing impaired. Only a fraction of them are enrolled in school, and of those who are, the educational experience is severely limited by the absence of a standardized Kenyan sign language and a near-total shortage of teachers who can sign at all. Norah Kimathi, 22, founded ZeroBionic in Nairobi to address both problems at once.

Each ZeroBionic robotic hand is 3D-printed from recycled plastic litter and sold for $350. It lasts three years without maintenance and achieves a 92% speech-to-sign accuracy rating. The hand sits alongside a teacher and translates their spoken words into signed gestures in real time, allowing a teacher who has never learned sign language to be understood by deaf students who have never had access to a full classroom education. ZeroBionic has already sold 78 units.

The technical challenge was only half the work. When Kimathi's team went to build the translation database, they discovered there was no unified Kenyan or African sign language dataset in existence. They had to create one themselves, enlisting deaf teachers and experienced signers to record their movements using an electrode-lined bodysuit that had to be imported. "No one else had built this on the continent," Kimathi told AFP. "We had to start from scratch." The next step is Africa One, a robotic upper torso designed to expand the vocabulary and accuracy further. "We know we're going to put a smile on someone else's face."

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Inhibitory control, the ability to pause an impulse in favor of a more rational course of action, is considered one of the most important markers of advanced cognitive function. It has been documented in various birds and mammals but never, until now, in elephants. A new study from Hunter College at the City University of New York, conducted at the National Elephant Institute in Thailand, provides the first experimental evidence that Asian elephants possess it.

The experiment was straightforward. Researchers presented elephants with a transparent box containing fruit, fitted with small holes they could smell and see through but not reach into, and an opening on the side they had been taught to use. The elephants consistently resisted the obvious but ineffective impulse to reach directly toward the food and chose the correct opening instead. When the box was rotated, the elephants initially reached for the previous opening position before quickly catching and correcting themselves, with older individuals taking slightly longer to adjust.

The research adds to nearly two decades of work by Professor Joshua Plotnik of CUNY, who has shown that elephants can recognize themselves in mirrors, console distressed companions, and coordinate actions with partners. The conservation implications are significant. Elephants that live near human communities tend to take more risks and explore unfamiliar situations, behaviors that can lead to conflict. "The more we understand about how elephants think and make decisions about risk," said Prof. Plotnik, "the better we can predict what they'll do next, and the better designed our strategies for human-elephant coexistence can be."

When Julia and her mother checked out of the Four Seasons San Domenico Palace in Taormina, Sicily, Julia's stuffed bear Rosie was swept up with the bedding by the housekeeping team and left behind. Her mother sent a message to the hotel explaining the situation and attaching a photo of Rosie. Then they waited. Would Rosie survive an industrial wash-and-dry cycle? Had the staff simply thrown her away?

As it turned out, Rosie just wasn't ready to end her vacation. The hotel staff not only located the bear but spent considerable time staging an elaborate photographic record of her extended stay: Rosie by the pool, Rosie at the bar, Rosie in a freshly made bed, Rosie enjoying the kind of holiday most people only dream of. They then wrote Julia a letter in Rosie's own voice and mailed it back with the bear, covering the shipping costs themselves.

"Dear my special friend," the letter began. "When we got separated at the beautiful San Domenico Palace, I was a little worried at first, but the kind people at the hotel took very good care of me while I waited for you. I had quite an adventure! I woke up to sunny mornings, relaxed by the pool, enjoyed delicious breakfasts, and explored some of the lovely corners of the hotel. I even pretended I was a very important guest for a few days!" Julia's older sister posted the photos and the letter on TikTok, where they were viewed by millions. The letter ended with a postscript that has no business being this moving: "My favorite place in the whole world is right beside you."

🛁 Serbia: Archaeologists have uncovered a luxurious Roman bath complex in Serbia featuring three pools and a sauna, built for Emperor Maximinus Daza, who briefly held the Roman throne before dying in a civil war, in an extraordinary find by the Institute of Archaeology. GNN World.

⚡ USA: A new historical account reveals how the 1965 New York blackout that trapped 800,000 people in the subway system left most of them inspiring each other with acts of spontaneous kindness and humor rather than panic, during six hours underground in the dark. GNN Inspiring.

🦕 USA: Scientists have identified the first-ever trackway of an adult Tyrannosaurus rex in North Dakota, a series of massive fossilized footprints that reveal exactly how the world's most famous predator walked 66 million years ago. GNN USA.

🌿 USA: Washington State has issued the first permit under the 2024 Good Samaritan Act allowing volunteers to clean up old mine waste from streams and waterways without legal liability, opening a new era of citizen-led environmental restoration. GNN Good Earth.

🐘 Portugal: Portugal's last remaining circus elephant, has been welcomed to the Pangea sanctuary after 40 years of performing, where she now has 1,000 acres to roam, other elephants for company, and no more shows to perform. GNN Animals.

On September 14, 2015, the LIGO and Virgo scientific collaborations detected a faint ripple in the fabric of spacetime: the gravitational wave signature of two black holes merging 1.3 billion light-years from Earth. The signal had been traveling through the universe since long before complex life existed on this planet. It lasted a fraction of a second. The instruments detected it in both LIGO facilities simultaneously, 7 milliseconds apart, confirming it was real. The discovery earned the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2017.

Einstein had predicted gravitational waves in 1916, one hundred years before they were detected. The experiment that found them required measuring a displacement smaller than one-thousandth the diameter of a proton across a 4-kilometer detector arm. It remains one of the most precise measurements in the history of science, and opened an entirely new way of observing the universe.

Other notable September 14 events:

1955: Little Richard recorded "Tutti Frutti" at a lunch break during a frustrating studio session, 71 years ago today, the song David Bowie called his most important musical inspiration and many music historians call the birth of rock and roll.

1939: Igor Sikorsky flew the first viable helicopter, 87 years ago today, a Russian-born boy who had built rubber band helicopters at age 12 and emigrated to the US to invent the rotor configuration used by nearly every helicopter flying today.

1985: The Golden Girls debuted on NBC, 41 years ago today, with Bea Arthur, Betty White, Rue McClanahan, and Estelle Getty, four women who each won Emmy Awards and became among the most beloved characters in American television history.

1984: Joseph Kittinger became the first person to cross the Atlantic Ocean solo in a gas-powered balloon, 42 years ago today, traveling 3,543 miles through the stratosphere and becoming the first human to fully witness the curvature of the Earth from above.

— Carl Sagan

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:

🧬 Catching Cancer in the Blood: Liquid biopsies, blood tests that detect tiny fragments of tumor DNA circulating in the bloodstream, can now identify certain cancers years before any symptoms appear, enabling the kind of genuinely early intervention that was previously impossible for some of the most lethal malignancies, including pancreatic and ovarian cancer.

🔬 Robots the Size of Cells: Microscopic robots that can be programmed to navigate the body, assemble into structures at a target site, deliver drugs directly to specific cells, and then disassemble when their work is done are now being tested in animal models for cancer treatment and targeted drug delivery, pointing toward a medicine that works at the cellular level.

🌊 Finally Mapping the Deep Currents: Scientists are deploying networks of autonomous underwater vehicles that map deep ocean current systems in real time, revealing how these vast, slow-moving rivers of water regulate global climate, distribute nutrients across entire ocean basins, and move heat from the tropics toward the poles in ways that were previously almost entirely invisible to observation.

🔭 Listening to the Universe in Every Language at Once: Astronomers are now coordinating observations across radio, infrared, optical, X-ray, gamma-ray, and gravitational wave detectors simultaneously, catching cosmic events like neutron star mergers in multiple wavelengths at the same moment and revealing physics that no single type of telescope could ever show alone.

🌱 Farming Indoors, Anywhere: Indoor vertical farms stacking crops in climate-controlled layers under LED lighting are now producing leafy greens, herbs, and strawberries at commercially competitive costs, using 95% less water than conventional agriculture, no pesticides, and no dependence on weather, soil quality, or proximity to traditional farmland.

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