A sealed tomb untouched for 2,600 years just gave up its secrets

Happy Wednesday. We made it to the middle of the week, and today's issue is one of those that genuinely surprised me as I was putting it together. A burial chamber in Egypt that nobody had opened in 2,600 years. A classroom of 4th graders who decided a lemonade stand was a perfectly reasonable response to a $10 million problem. A Lithuanian oak tree that a whole community decided to throw a party for. And a group of young people in a remote corner of India who put on olive drab t-shirts every morning and head into the forest to look after one of the world's rarest tortoises.

There's something in each of these stories about what happens when people decide to pay attention. That's your Wednesday theme.

Here's your good news.

—Stephanie S

Happy Wednesday. We made it to the middle of the week, and today's issue is one of those that genuinely surprised me as I was putting it together. A burial chamber in Egypt that nobody had opened in 2,600 years. A classroom of 4th graders who decided a lemonade stand was a perfectly reasonable response to a $10 million problem. A Lithuanian oak tree that a whole community decided to throw a party for. And a group of young people in a remote corner of India who put on olive drab t-shirts every morning and head into the forest to look after one of the world's rarest tortoises.

There's something in each of these stories about what happens when people decide to pay attention. That's your Wednesday theme.

Here's your good news.

—Stephanie S

👉 P.S. Good stories like these take real work to find every day. If Good News Break is worth $5 a month to you, that support goes directly into keeping this newsletter going five days a week.

In the Asasif necropolis in Luxor, archaeologists have unsealed a burial chamber that hadn't been opened since ancient Egypt's Third Intermediate Period, somewhere between 1070 and 664 BCE. Inside they found 22 coffins and 8 mummies arranged in careful rows, carved directly into bedrock, and undisturbed for roughly 2,600 years. What makes the discovery particularly striking is who appears to have been buried there.

The words "Singer of Amun" appear repeatedly on the coffins, suggesting the chamber was designed specifically for a special female religious caste who performed sacred songs at festivals and during temple rites. Evidence of how women lived and died within Egypt's religious hierarchy is rare, and the excavators described the find as exceptional. These women would have held significant spiritual and social status at the ancient temple of Karnak.

Most exciting of all are eight sealed jars, still bearing their original clay seals, arranged inside a large ceramic vessel. They have never been opened. Archaeologists believe they may contain organic remains, either funerary oils and resins or even biological material from the mummies themselves, and have described them as an information goldmine. State-of-the-art conservation and laboratory analysis is already underway.

Luxor is sometimes described as the world's largest open-air museum, and it keeps delivering. See the photos of the coffins and read what the excavators found inside.

Sara Stinson's 4th grade science class in Danville, California has been following Jackie and Shadow, a mating pair of bald eagles in Big Bear Valley, through a 24/7 livestream set up by the Friends of Big Bear Valley nonprofit. They watched the nest get built, the eggs get laid, the chicks hatch, and the eaglets grow. Then their teacher pulled up the livestream one day and noticed something alarming in the news alongside it.

The last undeveloped shoreline of Big Bear Lake, where Jackie and Shadow hunt, was about to become a luxury housing development. The San Bernardino Mountains Land Trust had entered into a purchase option agreement to buy the land, called Moon Camp, but had until the end of July to raise $10 million. The students' response was immediate. One set up a lemonade stand. Another started posting flyers around local businesses. A third said the news was very sad because they were worried the thing they had been watching for years could just go away.

The trust and the Friends of Big Bear Valley have so far raised around a quarter of the total, and the kids are still at it. Readers can donate directly at savemooncamp.org. Watch the ABC News story and see Jackie and Shadow for yourself.

In a small farming village in Lithuania called Rukai, there is an oak tree that has been standing since the early 1600s. For most of its life it was known only to the people who lived nearby. Then a year ago, the community decided to do something about that. They restored the land around the tree, built it a stone wall, and organized a celebration in its honor with music, costume, and people of all ages gathering beneath its canopy. The sixth generation of Laukiai families is now growing up in its shade.

In late March, the Oak of Laukiai was named European Tree of the Year, ending Poland's four-year winning streak in a continent-wide contest that drew more than 200,000 voters from 12 countries and 1.5 million website visits during the voting period. Second place went to a 150-year-old wild apple tree in Slovakia. Third went to a remarkable Polish white elm whose branches have each grown into trees in their own right, spreading out over a waterway like a living cathedral.

The contest coordinator called the competition extremely close, with the ranking uncertain until the very last moment. What put the Lithuanian oak over the top, by all accounts, was not just its age or its canopy, but the way it holds a community together. Watch the celebratory video and see this magnificent tree in its golden autumn colors.

In the far eastern Indian state of Nagaland, on the border with Myanmar, the Asian giant tortoise, mainland Asia's largest tortoise species, was heading toward extinction. The Nagaland Zoological Park began a captive breeding program starting with just 13 animals, some seized from local markets where they were destined to be eaten, others donated voluntarily by villagers who had kept them as pets. From those 13, 114 individuals have now been born, roughly half as many as the entire wild population across all of Asia.

What makes the program remarkable isn't the numbers. It's who is doing the tracking. Rather than relying on government conservationists, over 100 tortoises have been released into community tribal reserves across Nagaland, where young local men and women have been trained in basic conservation strategies. One of them is 33-year-old Iteichube, who leaves home at 8 a.m. every morning wearing his olive drab "Tortoise Guardian" t-shirt to search the forest for signs of the animals, nibbled leaves, depressed ground, the quiet evidence of a tortoise going about its day.

"We started by simply tracking them," Iteichube said, "but today we realize how important they are in keeping our forest vibrant and alive." The community that once hunted these animals is now their most dedicated protector. The success of the Nagaland model is already being replicated in the neighboring state of Manipur. Read the full story and meet the guardians.

🧪 Ireland: An 18-year-old student from Letterkenny named Arya Satheesh won the European Earth Prize for inventing a plant-based biodegradable plastic that breaks down safely while releasing enzymes that actively remove existing microplastics from soil and water as it degrades.

⚡ USA: The largest clean energy project ever built in the United States has started generating electricity, with SunZia Wind's 916 turbines in New Mexico now sending power across a 550-mile transmission line to California, which broke its wind generation record eight times in the last four weeks.

🦌 Chile: The Chilean government is moving forward with plans to create a national park at the end of the world, protecting 150,000 hectares of subantarctic forests, peatlands, glaciers, and coastline on the Brunswick Peninsula, home to wild pumas, huemul deer, and migrating humpback whales.

🪸 Global: Scientists analyzing coral reef microbiomes found that reefs contain a vast molecular library of unknown compounds that rival sponges as sources for new medicines and biotechnology, making their protection even more urgent than previously understood.

🦑 Australia: Scientists exploring deep underwater canyons off Western Australia uncovered signs of the legendary giant squid along with 226 species including several potentially unknown to science, by analyzing traces of DNA floating in seawater at depths exceeding 4 kilometers.

Cher was born on this day in 1946 in El Centro, California, and has spent the eight decades since defying every expectation placed on her. She reached the top of the charts in 1965 with Sonny and Cher's I Got You Babe, then rebuilt her career as a solo artist with four number one singles across four different decades. Then she became an Oscar-winning actress. Then she became a Broadway producer. She is the only artist in history to have a number one single on a Billboard chart in six consecutive decades, from the 1960s through the 2010s, a record that may never be broken.

What gets lost in the spectacle of her career is the genuine kindness underneath it. She paid for a shipment of water to the people of Flint, Michigan during the lead crisis. She spent four years campaigning to free Kaavan, a lonely elephant living in terrible conditions in an Islamabad zoo, and was there when he was finally relocated to a sanctuary. She turns 79 today, and a Universal Pictures biopic of her life is currently in production. As she once said, the only thing in the world you can change is yourself, and that takes guts.

Other notable May 20 events:

1873: Levi Strauss received a US patent for blue jeans with copper rivets, launching one of the most enduring items of clothing in human history.

1932: Amelia Earhart began the world's first solo transatlantic flight by a female pilot, taking off from Newfoundland and landing the next day in a field in Ireland.

1908: Actor Jimmy Stewart was born, going on to star in some of the greatest American films ever made, including It's a Wonderful Life, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and Rear Window, while also flying more than a dozen combat missions in World War II despite being offered a safe post.

1916: The first Norman Rockwell painting appeared on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post, launching a 64-year relationship between the artist and the magazine that would produce some of the most beloved images of American life ever created.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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:

🚀 Commercial Space Is Real: Private companies have now launched more than 10,000 satellites into orbit, built reusable rockets that land themselves back on Earth, and are actively preparing to send paying passengers to the Moon, something that seemed like pure fiction just 20 years ago.

🧠 Depression Is Becoming Treatable: New treatments for depression including ketamine therapy and TMS are showing remission rates of 50 to 70% in patients who failed to respond to traditional antidepressants, giving real hope to the estimated 300 million people worldwide who live with the condition.

🌳 Ancient Forests Are Being Found: Scientists are still discovering old-growth forests that have never been logged, including a 500-year-old forest found in the Blue Mountains of Australia in 2024 that had been hidden in plain sight, reminding us that the planet still holds wonders we haven't mapped.

🐬 Dolphin Communication Decoded: Researchers are making genuine progress in understanding dolphin language, with AI now able to identify individual signature whistles and map communication patterns in ways that suggest dolphins may have a far more complex social language than previously understood.

🌾 Ending World Hunger Is Possible: For the first time in history, the world produces enough food to feed every person on Earth, with hunger now primarily a distribution and access problem rather than a production one, meaning the solution is political and logistical rather than agricultural.

Spread a little good news, and good things come back your way.

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