A Nashville country songwriter just logged 234 volunteer hours in one month rescuing foxes with mange

Happy Friday. Jerry Vandiver has written songs for Tim McGraw and Barbara Mandrell for decades. For the last seven years he has also been waking up at any hour to trap foxes with mange and drive them to a wildlife rescue center in Nashville. That's today's lead story.

We also have three Harvard students who just won the James Dyson Award for a sideline concussion screener that gives coaches objective guidance in two minutes, Chinese scientists who cut oil refining energy use by 91% using molecular membranes, and the solved mystery behind the largest single snowfall event ever recorded in Antarctica.

Have a great weekend.

—Stephanie S

Jerry Vandiver, 78, has written country songs recorded by Tim McGraw, Phil Vassar, and Barbara Mandrell since the 1980s. For the last seven years he has run a parallel life: monitoring trail cameras across Nashville, responding to Facebook messages from residents who spot sick foxes, and driving to Walden's Puddle Animal Rescue at whatever hour a trap springs. Tennessee is in the grip of a serious mange epidemic, and the foxes are suffering for it.

Mange is caused by skin mites that trigger hair loss, rashes, and open sores. Left untreated it kills through secondary infections. It is highly contagious. Vandiver has learned to trap the animals, transport them safely, and document their recoveries. His Facebook following grew from 325 to 5,000 people as he posted before-and-after videos of foxes going from barely recognizable to fully recovered.

In all of 2025, Walden's Puddle rehabilitated 44 red foxes. By September 2026, they had already passed 60, largely because of Vandiver. "I'm not the hero, I'm just the ambulance driver," he said. "Mange is treatable. If we can catch them, they can have a healthy, happy life. I know how to do that. I can't walk away from them when I see those pictures."

The CDC estimates that 15% of US high school students, roughly 2.5 million young athletes, reported at least one sports concussion in the past year. Playing for just 15 minutes after a concussion can double recovery time. The problem is that coaches have no reliable way to assess the injury on the sideline, in real time, without a medical professional present.

Radhika Saran, Cleo Pontone, and Sophia DeVito built one. Their device, Rumble Rims, is a low-cost eye-tracking headset that conducts a 2-3 minute screening using infrared light invisible to the athlete. The athlete follows an oculomotor task while a coach-facing mobile display provides real-time guidance on whether to remove the player. A recovery dashboard creates an objective record for follow-up testing.

The device won the 2026 James Dyson Award for the United States, along with a $6,500 prize for next development steps. "Sideline assessment tools haven't kept pace with what we know about concussion science," said Saran. The team plans to build a higher-fidelity prototype and pilot the device with schools and coaches.

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Traditional oil refining works by boiling crude oil repeatedly, exploiting slight differences in boiling points to separate its components. It is energy-intensive by design, and oil refining accounts for up to 4% of all human-related CO2 emissions globally, making it the third-largest stationary contributor to greenhouse gas output on Earth.

Scientists at the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics in northern China developed an alternative they call molecular refining. Two specially designed membrane sieves separate crude oil molecule by molecule at room temperature, with one membrane targeting the components needed for ethylene production and another for gasoline. The size difference between the molecule groups being separated is about one-one hundredth of a nanometer.

In lab tests with a light sweet crude mixture containing 15 different chemicals, the method separated the oil into three groups of high-value products with a recovery rate of 85-90% and used 91% less energy than conventional distillation. The process is still lab-scale, and scaling to industrial levels remains unproven. But if it gets there, the implications for one of the world's most emissions-intensive industries are significant.

Between 2021 and 2023, East Antarctica gained approximately 695 billion tons of ice in a single snowfall event, equivalent to roughly four years of average annual ice loss run in reverse. It was the largest ice mass-gain ever recorded by GRACE satellites, and scientists didn't fully understand why it happened. Now they do.

The trigger was a warming event in the tropical warm pool, the region where the tropical Pacific meets the Indian Ocean. That warming set off a Rossby wave train that reorganized moisture transport across the Southern Hemisphere, channeling atmospheric rivers of moist air from the midlatitude Indian Ocean toward Queen Mary's Land and Wilkes Land in East Antarctica, producing an extraordinary regional snowfall event.

The findings matter for climate modeling. Similar tropical warm pool warming events occur roughly once per decade, meaning the next comparable snowfall could arrive around 2031-33. The event was driven primarily by natural climate variability, not human-caused warming. And while it temporarily slowed ice-sheet mass loss, it doesn't offset the longer-term trajectory of Antarctic ice decline.

🥬 Global: Scientists at South Korea's World Institute of Kimchi found that a bacterium found in fermented kimchi can bind to nanoplastics in the gut and more than double their excretion in mice, offering a surprising new approach to reducing plastic accumulation in the body. Published in Bioresource Technology.

🦁 USA: A Stanford study at Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve found that occasional mountain lion visits triggered a cascading ecological transformation — deer activity dropped, young oak trees recovered, and populations of coyotes, bobcats, and foxes all shifted — showing trophic cascades can happen even in small suburban preserves.

🧠 Global: Johns Hopkins researchers discovered that brain cell axons — previously assumed to be smooth tubes for more than a century — actually resemble strings of tiny pearls, a finding that could reshape understanding of how the brain's wiring transmits signals. Published in Nature Neuroscience.

💊 USA: Georgia State University researchers developed an oral antiviral pill, GHP-88310, that completely blocked airborne and direct-contact transmission of a measles-like virus in ferrets when given before or after exposure, raising hopes for a drug that could help contain future measles outbreaks. Published in Nature Microbiology.

🍇 Global: Scientists discovered that pterostilbene, a natural compound found in blueberries, grapes, and other berries, directly influences how skeletal muscle cells process and burn fat, opening new avenues for research into metabolic health and muscle function. September 17, 2026.

On September 18, 1849, Harriet Tubman fled the plantation in Maryland where she had been enslaved and followed the North Star 90 miles north toward Philadelphia. The first person to help her was a Quaker woman whose name she never learned. When she crossed the Mason-Dixon line, she later wrote: "When I found I had crossed that line, I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything."

She went back. Thirteen times, over the following years, Tubman returned to guide more than 70 people to freedom along the Underground Railroad. She served as a scout and spy for the Union Army during the Civil War, and later became a prominent voice in the women's suffrage movement alongside Susan B. Anthony. She never lost a single passenger.

Other notable September 18 events:

1951: A Streetcar Named Desire premiered in New York City, 75 years ago today, with Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando, earning 10 Oscar nominations and winning four.

1948: Margaret Chase Smith became the first woman elected to the United States Senate, 78 years ago today, and later delivered the Declaration of Conscience speech calling out McCarthyism while her colleagues stayed silent.

1927: The Columbia Phonograph Broadcasting System made its radio debut across 16 stations, 99 years ago today, the network that would eventually become CBS.

1946: Tonka Trucks was founded in Mound, Minnesota, 80 years ago today, named after the Dakota Sioux word for great or big, with a slogan that still holds: "Tonka tough, built to last."

— Arthur Ashe

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:

🧬 Turning Back the Clock Inside Cells: Scientists are using cocktails of proteins to partially reverse the biological age of cells, resetting epigenetic markers of aging without erasing what the cell does, with early results showing restored vision, muscle function, and cognitive performance in aged mice. The goal is to do the same in people.

🔬 Plants That Harvest Sunlight Better: Scientists are engineering crop plants with more efficient versions of the photosynthesis process, allowing them to convert sunlight into energy faster and produce significantly higher yields using the same land, water, and light as conventional varieties. Field trials are now underway across multiple crop types.

🌊 Bringing Kelp Forests Back: Marine biologists are restoring kelp forests using sea urchin removal, seed seeding ropes, and drone-assisted planting at scales previously impossible, with large-scale projects now underway in California, Australia, and Norway. Kelp forests support as much marine biodiversity as tropical rainforests support on land.

💡 Batteries That Charge in Minutes: Solid-state batteries, which replace the liquid electrolyte in conventional lithium-ion cells with a solid material, offer dramatically higher energy density, faster charging, and improved safety, with electric vehicles using them able to charge in minutes and travel significantly further per charge. Multiple automakers have announced production timelines within this decade.

🫧 Growing Brains in the Lab to Understand Disease: Scientists are now cultivating miniature human brain organoids that replicate the structure and function of specific brain regions, enabling drug testing and the study of conditions including Alzheimer's and autism in living human tissue for the first time. What took decades of animal studies can now be observed directly in human cells.

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