A twice-yearly injection just prevented HIV in every single participant. Every one

Happy Wednesday. I want to start with a number today, because I think it deserves a moment.

Zero. That's how many of the 3,200 young women in Uganda and South Africa who received a twice-yearly HIV prevention injection contracted the virus during the trial. Not a handful. Not a few. Zero. Scientists were so certain of the result they stopped the trial early on ethical grounds, because continuing to give participants anything other than the new drug felt wrong.

We also have some genuinely beautiful news from Wales, the ocean, California, and the Pacific Northwest today. And yes, a condor.

Here's your good news.

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—Stephanie S

In the PURPOSE 1 trial, 3,200 young women in Uganda and South Africa received a twice-yearly injection of a drug called Lenacapavir. When researchers counted new HIV infections at the end of the trial, they found zero. Not a reduced rate. Zero. The trial was halted early because continuing to give participants anything other than the new drug felt ethically indefensible.

PURPOSE 2 expanded to 5,000 participants across South America, South Africa, Thailand, Uganda, and the US, including men who have sex with men and transgender individuals. The result: 99.9% reduction. Halted early again for the same reason. Lenacapavir was already Science Magazine's Breakthrough of the Year in 2024 and is now FDA-approved as Yeztugo. It works by disrupting the HIV capsid shell at a target protein so consistent that no mutation can circumvent it.

The current standard of care, a daily pill, also achieves 99.9% efficacy when taken every day. That is exactly the problem. Daily adherence is genuinely hard, particularly where stigma around being seen taking a daily pill can be life-threatening.

Gilead has committed to providing Lenacapavir at cost in low-income regions and licensed generic production at approximately $40 per year across 120 countries starting in 2027. Twice a year. $40. Zero infections. Read the full story and find out what happens next.

For decades, mangrove forests were disappearing. They were cleared for shrimp farms, coastal housing, and aquaculture across South and Southeast Asia. Between the 1980s and 2010, the world lost nearly 1,120 square miles of them. A new study published in Science by researchers at Tulane University now confirms that the destruction has not only stopped but reversed. The world has more mangrove forest today than it did at the turn of the century.

Beyond the area gains, existing forests are becoming denser and healthier. Closed-canopy mangrove forests, which store the most carbon and provide the strongest coastal protection, have expanded globally over the past four decades. The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami provided devastating evidence of their value, as islands in Indonesia that still had their mangroves were dramatically better protected than those that had cleared them.

Mangroves absorb up to five times more carbon than terrestrial trees, filter pollutants from coastal water, and serve as nurseries for fish, invertebrates, and crustaceans that sustain entire ocean food chains. "What we're seeing now is a real shift," said Daniel Friess of Tulane's Mangrove Lab. "This could make them a rare conservation success story and an important source of optimism for climate action." Read the full study and see the photos.

In October 1912, red ochre stripes were discovered on a wall in Bacon Cave near Mumbles on the Gower Peninsula in Wales. Scientists at the time believed they were made by humans. Then a 1928 analysis concluded the red streaks were simply iron oxide seeping through cracks in the rock, and the Guardian reported it as such. The art world moved on. The cave was largely forgotten.

A century later, Dr. George Nash led an international team back to Bacon Cave using uranium-thorium dating to analyze the pigments directly. The result overturned the 1928 verdict completely. The stripes are prehistoric art, intentionally made by human hands, and are 17,100 years old, making them the oldest cave painting ever found in the British Isles. The Guardian issued what was effectively a 98-year correction.

"We've used uranium-thorium dating for the pigments," Nash said. "We've got data 17,100 years before present. I was taken aback that we were able to date it. This is an exciting rediscovery, significant in understanding what was going on in Wales in the deep past." The team believes Bacon Cave should be protected as a national monument. See the side-by-side photos from 1913 and 2024 and read the full story.

Last month, a California condor designated B9 flew north from her home in Redwood National Park, crossed into Oregon, made stops near Medford, Cave Junction, and Brookings, and returned south four days and 380 miles later. She was the first condor recorded in Oregon since 1904. B9 was born in captivity and released into the wild in 2022 by the Yurok Tribe's Wildlife Department, whose technicians have been tracking her movements ever since.

The California condor came within a whisker of extinction in the 1980s, when the last 22 wild birds were captured and placed in a breeding program. The decision to remove every remaining wild bird was deeply controversial at the time. It was also the right one. Today, hundreds of condors exist, with a growing wild population along the California coast, and the Yurok-managed Redwoods flock is one of the most closely watched recovery programs in North America.

"She flew almost 100 miles per day," said Yurok Wildlife Department Director Tiana Williams Claussen, "which means she was really utilizing the landscape the way that only a condor can." Earlier this year, a female condor laid an egg in the hollow of a redwood tree in the park, the first known nesting attempt in the region in over a century. The egg didn't hatch, but Williams Claussen called it an amazing milestone regardless. See the photos and read the full story.

🌊 Global: Marine protected areas now cover 10% of the world's oceans, reaching one-third of the 30x30 goal of protecting 30% of all seas by 2030, with 284 new MPAs recently added in Indonesia and Thailand and Ghana declaring its first marine protected area this year.

🧹 USA: The Ocean Cleanup, the Dutch nonprofit that has removed millions of pounds of plastic from the Pacific, has deployed its Interceptor system on Los Angeles waterways to capture trash before it reaches the ocean, with the 2028 Olympics providing a powerful deadline for delivering clean rivers to the world.

🐚 USA: For the first time in five years, a live white abalone has been found in the wild during a Channel Islands survey, reviving hopes for a species once so abundant it fed California coastal communities for centuries and commercially extinct since the 1990s.

🌿 Colombia: Colombia has become the first tropical forest country to enact a cattle traceability law, requiring full supply chain accountability to ensure beef cannot be sourced from illegally deforested land, a move conservation groups are calling one of the most significant anti-deforestation measures in Latin American history.

⛪ Spain: Pope Leo XIV today blessed and inaugurated the Tower of Jesus Christ at the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, completing the central spire of Antoni Gaudí's masterpiece after 144 years of continuous construction.

On June 9, 1935, Bill Wilson drank for the last time. The following day, in Akron, Ohio, he co-founded Alcoholics Anonymous with Dr. Bob Smith, a surgeon whose own drinking had nearly destroyed his career and marriage. The two men had something they needed each other for: Wilson had found that staying sober was easier when he helped another alcoholic do the same. That insight, that recovery is both personal and communal, became the philosophical foundation of everything that followed.

AA's Twelve Steps, developed with the help of early members and published in 1939, provided a framework of spiritual and character development that required no professional training, no hierarchy, and no fees. The Twelve Traditions, introduced in 1946, kept the organization deliberately modest: no property, no political positions, no outside endorsements, no publicity seeking. The fellowship would exist only to help alcoholics at a non-professional level, one human being to another. By 2016, close to two million people worldwide were estimated to be AA members.

The model proved so transferable that Narcotics Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous, and dozens of other recovery fellowships adapted the Twelve Steps for their own communities, creating one of the most quietly influential social movements in modern history. It began with two men in Akron, and the principle that the only thing required to keep what you have is to give it away.

Other notable June 10 events:

1922: Judy Garland was born in Minnesota, going on to star in The Wizard of Oz, win a Grammy Award for Judy at Carnegie Hall, and earn Academy Award nominations for A Star is Born and Judgment at Nuremberg. She was the first woman to win the Grammy for Album of the Year. She turns 104 today.

1959: Carlo Ancelotti was born in Italy, going on to become the most decorated manager in Champions League history, the only manager to win the top-flight title in all five of Europe's major leagues, and one of the most loved figures in world football. He turns 67 today.

1964: The Rolling Stones visited Chess Records at 2120 South Michigan Avenue in Chicago during their first US tour, recording R&B covers alongside their blues heroes Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, and Chuck Berry, producing their first number one hit It's All Over Now.

1975: The Eagles released One of These Nights, their first number one album, featuring three top ten singles and cementing their place as one of the defining bands of the decade.

— Albert Einstein

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:

🧠 Treating Epilepsy With Light: Optogenetic therapy, which uses light to activate specific neurons in the brain, has moved into early human trials, offering people with drug-resistant epilepsy a path to treatment that doesn't require invasive surgery or lifelong medication.

🧬 Reading the Language of Life: DeepMind's AlphaFold has predicted the 3D structure of nearly every known protein on earth, solving a 50-year grand challenge in biology and giving scientists a tool that is already accelerating drug discovery and transforming our understanding of disease at a pace that would have taken centuries before.

🌿 Peatlands Holding the Climate: The world's peatlands cover just 3% of land but store twice as much carbon as all of the world's forests combined, and active restoration programs across Scotland, Canada, Finland, and Indonesia are bringing these ecosystems back to life, locking away centuries worth of carbon in the process.

🐘 Elephants Have Names for Each Other: AI analysis of elephant vocalizations has revealed that African elephants use specific calls to address individual family members, with other elephants responding selectively to calls directed at them, suggesting a complexity of communication that challenges everything we thought we knew about non-human language.

🌱 The Prairie Is Coming Back: Large-scale restoration projects across North America are returning native grasses, wildflowers, and grassland birds to millions of acres of degraded farmland, rebuilding ecosystems that store carbon, filter water, and support biodiversity nearly eliminated by a century of intensive agriculture.

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

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