A retired fisherman just gave CPR to a baby otter, and the otter still recognizes the woman who sang it a lullaby

Happy Friday. This week has been a lot. We lost Dolly Parton. NASA is launching a new space telescope on Sunday. And somewhere in Alert Bay, British Columbia, a baby otter is back in the water with its family, alive because a retired fisherman wrapped his mouth around its nose and breathed.

We also have Pakistan creating 249 miles of connected river dolphin habitat, a Vancouver startup turning logging waste into a replacement for polystyrene foam, and a sidewalk robot named Dax who has quietly become a local celebrity in five American cities.

Have a great weekend.

—Stephanie S

Gordon Mellish has given mouth-to-mouth CPR to 10 humans across his years on the water in Alert Bay, British Columbia. Last week a neighbor called to say three baby otters were tangled in a fishing net at the marina. The first two were fine. The third wasn't moving. Mellish did what he knew how to do: heart compressions first, then he wrapped his mouth around the otter's nose and mouth and gave it a breath.

It worked. Robin Quirk, a local woman who came over from the small crowd that had gathered, took the revived pup and built it a shelter from the sun and birds of prey. The nearest wildlife rescue center was a long drive and a ferry ride away, so Quirk cared for it in her car overnight, making up a lullaby to keep it calm. "You know how if you can't get your baby to sleep, you take it for a drive?" she told CTV News. "Well, the otter slept the whole way."

After a week of rehabilitation, both Mellish and Quirk were invited to watch the otter return to the water. It leaped in, turned back, and Mellish waved. The otter nodded its head before swimming away. Subsequent sightings have confirmed it has rejoined its siblings and mother.

It still recognizes Quirk, provided she whistles the lullaby she made up in the car. "A life's a life no matter what it is," Mellish said. "Try to do your best to save it." Watch the CTV News segment and read the full story.

The Indus River Dolphin is the world's second rarest river dolphin, with only around 2,000 remaining. Dams, irrigation canals, and decades of river infrastructure had fragmented their habitat into isolated pockets, cutting populations off from each other and limiting their ability to recover. The Punjab government's creation of the Punjnad Indus River Dolphin Sanctuary changes that.

The new sanctuary covers 123 miles of river where approximately 440 dolphins live, and connects directly with an existing protected area in neighboring Sindh Province. The result is roughly 249 miles of continuous connected habitat under legal protection, the length of New York State, the largest such corridor ever created for the species.

WWF-Pakistan, which has worked on Indus dolphin conservation since the 1990s, will partner with the governments of Islamabad and Punjab to develop a management plan. As an apex predator, the dolphin's recovery requires a healthy riverine ecosystem beneath it. "If the nation can but protect its dolphins," WWF notes, "it may very well protect the whole river at the same time." Read the full story.

Polystyrene foam is arguably the most environmentally destructive common packaging material. It sheds microplastics readily, and scientists estimate it takes around 1,000 years to break down. The logging industry, meanwhile, generates enormous quantities of sawdust, wood chips, and pulp residue at every stage of the supply chain, much of it left to accumulate on forest floors where it can accelerate wildfires. A University of British Columbia team led by Professor Feng Jiang decided to solve both problems at once.

The resulting material, called wood foam, is made by homogenizing low-value forestry residues into a feedstock that gets heat-pressed into panels with the same structural properties as polystyrene. A pilot plant in East Vancouver is already producing around 400 pounds per day, with plans to scale to a 1,000-ton-per-year operation at a facility on the shores of Burns Lake, owned by the Wet'suwet'en First Nation.

"Every tree that gets harvested, 30% of the tree doesn't get utilized," said CEO Richard Chen of DicinFoam, the startup spun out of UBC. "If we can even get a fraction of that and replace everyday products made of plastics, I feel that's a big deal." At 15,000 tons per year, the team believes wood foam will be cost-competitive with the polystyrene it replaces. Read the full story.

Dax is 35 inches tall, white, moves at walking pace, and looks like something out of a Pixar film. He was originally developed by an Oregon-based robotics startup to deliver pizzas. Then a city planner called one day and asked if he could survey sidewalks instead. That pivot turned out to be a better fit for both Dax and the cities that needed him.

The Daxbot continuously measures sidewalk gradients, widths, and vertical changes as it rolls, packaging the data for city planners to identify which repairs are most urgent. Working in the July heat of Tyler, Texas, for instance, is difficult for human surveyors on black asphalt. Dax doesn't mind. Cities like Hoboken and Tyler have set goals of zero pedestrian traffic deaths, and poorly maintained sidewalks push pedestrians onto roads where 9 in 10 pedestrian deaths occur. Bangor plans to deploy 6 units, each covering 6 miles of sidewalk per day, wearing hi-visibility jackets.

Dax is currently operating in Bangor, Maine; Hoboken, New Jersey; Hollister, California; Tyler, Texas; and Hilton Head, South Carolina. Cities are encouraging residents to take selfies with him and tag their official accounts. "By combining innovative technology like Daxbot with feedback from residents," said Hoboken Mayor Emily Jabbour, "we'll better understand where improvements are needed." Read the full story.

🌸 Australia: Scientists at Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria and citizen volunteers have successfully bred and transplanted hundreds of the rare Rosella spider orchid, a "cryptic" species that takes years to flower and had been overlooked in conservation programs, in a major step toward saving it from extinction.

🧠 Global: Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine found a brain-based "brake" in a cluster of nerve cells deep in the brain that can shut down chronic nerve pain by calming an overactive pain circuit, without affecting opioid receptors throughout the rest of the nervous system. Published in Current Biology.

🔭 Global: NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has confirmed Betelgeuse's long-suspected companion star, named Siwarha, by detecting the ripple it creates in the red supergiant's outer atmosphere as it orbits every six years, resolving one of the biggest mysteries about the famous star in Orion's shoulder.

⚗️ Global: Researchers at the University of Technology Sydney and Harvard created smart nanoparticles that illuminate hidden glioblastoma cells during surgery and then destroy microscopic cancer left behind, with 100% of treated mice surviving 60 days compared to 42 days for surgery alone. Published in Science Translational Medicine.

🍃 Global: A Yale School of Medicine study found that modest calorie restriction lowers an immune protein called C3 that drives chronic inflammation as the body ages, and that blocking C3 in mice reduced age-related inflammation even without dietary changes, raising the prospect of a drug shortcut to some of calorie restriction's anti-aging benefits. Published in Nature Aging.

On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC and delivered the speech that would define the American civil rights movement. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom had drawn 250,000 people to the National Mall. Speaking without notes for the final portion, King described his vision of a nation where people would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

The speech is considered one of the greatest in American history. Its closing passages, improvised from a theme King had used before, built into a vision of freedom ringing from every mountainside, of little Black children and little white children joining hands as sisters and brothers. Within a year, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been signed into law.

Other notable August 28 events:

1789: William Herschel discovered Enceladus, 237 years ago today, the sixth largest moon of Saturn, now known to have a global liquid water ocean beneath its icy surface and considered one of the most promising places in the solar system to look for life.

1845: Scientific American published its first issue, 181 years ago today, a four-page weekly newspaper covering US patent news, now the oldest continuously published monthly magazine in the United States.

1837: Worcestershire Sauce was manufactured for the first time, 189 years ago today, by pharmacists John Lea and William Perrins in Worcester, England, from a nobleman's recipe acquired in India, with ingredients that still mature 18 months before bottling.

1991: Ukraine declared independence from the Soviet Union, 35 years ago today, after decades of occupation.

— Abraham Lincoln

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:

🧬 Reading the Hidden Parts of Our DNA: Third-generation sequencing technologies that read DNA in long, continuous stretches, rather than short fragments, are now resolving complex regions of the human genome that previous tools could never reach, uncovering thousands of structural variants linked to disease that had been hiding in plain sight for decades.

🔬 Electronics That Grow and Disappear: Scientists are engineering living cells to produce conductive biological materials that can be printed into flexible electronic circuits, creating devices that integrate seamlessly with body tissue and biodegrade naturally when their job is done, pointing toward implantable medical tools that leave nothing behind.

🌊 Bringing Rivers Back to Life: Conservationists are removing dams, restoring floodplains, and reintroducing keystone species to rivers across Europe and North America, recovering salmon runs, river forests, and water quality in ways that benefit entire downstream ecosystems and communities that depend on them.

🔭 Reading the Weather on Other Worlds: The James Webb Space Telescope is producing the first detailed weather maps of gas giant exoplanets hundreds of light-years from Earth, tracking the movement of clouds, storms, and atmospheric bands with a clarity that would have seemed impossible just a decade ago.

🌱 Growing Food With Better Light: Researchers are fine-tuning the specific wavelengths of LED light used in vertical farms to dramatically increase the nutritional content, flavor compounds, and yields of crops grown indoors, making indoor agriculture a genuine competitor with field-grown produce on both health value and taste.

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