Activists in China just stopped a highway from destroying the last habitat of a critically endangered bird

Happy Tuesday. Today's issue is one of those where the details are everything.

In China, a student studying abroad heard about a highway threatening a coastal mudflat and started making calls. There are fewer than 500 of this particular sandpiper left on earth. For 25 days, ordinary people refused to let that number get smaller. Our lead story is theirs.

We also have extraordinary before and after photos of a Herefordshire riverbank that a farmer destroyed and the law made him restore. Three sleep habits that research suggests are ageing your brain. And a Mexican avocado harvest so spectacular it ended with the largest bowl of guacamole ever made.

—Stephanie S

On April 30th, authorities in Guangxi, China approved a highway cutting through 50 acres of coastal mudflat that 20,000 birds rely on for feeding and rest. Among them were 14 spoon-billed sandpipers, a shorebird with fewer than 500 individuals left on earth. The road was approved. The diggers were ready.

Li Jiahe was studying in the Netherlands when he heard about it online. He had never been to Guangxi. He had never seen the bird. He emailed the Ramsar Convention at the UN directly, explaining that the mudflat qualified for international protection under Chinese law. Other activists contacted local environmental authorities. BirdLife International got involved. A social media campaign called Save the Little Spoon spread across China.

Then correspondence went quiet. The build had been approved and it seemed lost. But on May 9th, a central environmental inspection team arrived in Guangxi for a monthlong review and got more than an earful. By May 25th, Guangxi authorities confirmed the original environmental impact assessment lacked scientific basis. The project was suspended.

"We're all ordinary people. We are small," Li told Sixth Tone. "But if we can raise awareness and plant a seed in people's minds, that's already a good thing." The sandpipers will keep coming back to Guangxi. Read the full story and find out what happens next with the highway.

In 2020, a farmer named John Price used an 18-ton digger to dredge a section of the River Lugg in Herefordshire, stripped every tree from a mile-long stretch of one of Britain's most important salmon rivers, and removed tons of gravel from the riverbed to build a road and horse yard at his home. A judge called it ecological vandalism on an industrial scale. Price was jailed for 12 months and ordered to pay £600,000, replant the trees, and restore the bank.

Six years later, new photos taken at the same locations show what happened when nature was simply left to work. New trees and bushes are growing back. Wildflowers have returned. The Environment Agency and Natural England confirm trout, bullhead, and minnows are present again, alongside kingfishers and sand martins.

Environmental designer Richard Fishbourne, who has been monitoring the site, put it simply. "If you let Mother Nature flourish, she will work her magic." It will take decades for full recovery, but what the before and after photographs show is already remarkable. See the photos side by side and read the full story.

A University of Arizona study of more than 23,000 middle-aged and older adults has identified three sleep behaviors linked to measurable signs of brain aging. Using brain MRI scans taken roughly nine years after participants completed sleep questionnaires, researchers found that sleeping outside the recommended seven to nine hours, frequent daytime napping, and sleeplessness were all associated with greater white matter lesion volume, an indicator of brain deterioration linked to dementia and Alzheimer's disease.

The findings held even after researchers controlled for related factors like high blood pressure, smoking, and physical inactivity. Two other sleep behaviors, snoring and unintentional daytime dozing, did not show the same independent link. Lead researcher Madeline Ally noted that sleep is usually studied as a single measure rather than a collection of distinct patterns, which can obscure how different habits relate to brain health over time.

The researchers were careful to note that the relationship between napping and brain health is nuanced. Short, occasional naps may still benefit alertness and cognition. But what matters most, said senior author Professor Gene Alexander, is this: all three behaviors are modifiable. "If we can improve the quality of our sleep, it may help reduce the impacts of brain aging and maybe even lower the risk for dementias like Alzheimer's disease." Read the full study and find out exactly what the three habits are.

The Mexican state of Michoacan produces more avocados than anywhere else on earth. This year's harvest was a record-breaker, and the growers decided to celebrate accordingly. At the 13th annual Avocado Festival in Tancitaro, more than 1,000 producers gathered to make the largest bowl of guacamole in history. A Guinness World Record official was on hand to verify the result: just under 15,000 pounds of guacamole, prepared in two and a half hours and served to thousands of festival visitors.

The title had briefly left Tancitaro. A nearby municipality, Periban, claimed it in 2022. That particular injustice has now been corrected. The 2026 harvest is projected to produce 2.5 billion pounds of avocados for export to the United States alone, making this both a celebration and a statement about the extraordinary agricultural abundance of the region.

"This moment belongs to the thousands of Michoacan families whose livelihoods are rooted on avocado farms," said Raul E. Martínez Pulido, president of the Association of Avocado Exporting Producers and Packers of Mexico. See the photos of the world's largest bowl of guacamole and read the full story.

🔬 Global: Scientists have discovered that when cancer cells shut down a key immune-recognition molecule called MHC I to hide from killer T cells, they actually become more vulnerable to attack by a different class of immune cells, overturning a core belief in immunology and pointing toward new approaches to cancer treatment.

🎟️ UK: A retired British couple accidentally bought two tickets for the same Postcode Lottery draw and found out both were winners, doubling their jackpot in what they called the best mistake they ever made.

🧠 USA: The Allen Institute in Seattle has launched the Brain Health Accelerator, an ambitious global initiative backed by 30 partner organizations to develop precision genetic therapies for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, ALS, Huntington's, and Lewy body dementia, targeting the specific brain cells and circuits affected by each disease.

✝️ Spain: One million people flooded the streets of Madrid for Pope Leo XIV's Corpus Christi Mass and flower-petal procession, the largest gathering in Spain in years and the highlight of the first papal visit to the country in 15 years.

🧬 Global: Scientists have identified a fat molecule called phosphatidylcholine as a hidden driver of cellular aging, finding that it declines as we age and that restoring its levels reverses aging effects in cells, opening a new and potentially reversible approach to longevity

Lester Polsfuss was born in Waukesha, Wisconsin, 111 years ago today and grew up to become Les Paul, one of the most important figures in the history of recorded music. As a teenager he carved his first solid body electric guitar out of a piece of railroad plank, having already built his own speaker and one of the earliest working electric guitars from scratch. He was, by any measure, a natural engineer who happened to also be a phenomenal musician.

His experiments in multi-track recording, funded by Bing Crosby after Crosby became fascinated by what Paul was doing in his garage studio, changed how music was made permanently. Before Les Paul, recordings captured a single performance in real time. After him, musicians could layer sound on sound, building compositions of extraordinary complexity and depth. Every modern recording, from pop to classical to jazz, uses techniques he pioneered. The Gibson Les Paul guitar, first produced in 1952, became the instrument of choice for rock legends from Jimmy Page to Slash, and is still in production today.

He died in 2009 having received his last two Grammy Awards three years earlier, at the age of 90. Until the end he performed weekly at a Manhattan jazz club despite significant physical disabilities. He once said he would never retire because retirement was what killed people.

Other notable June 9 events:

1909: Alice Ramsey, a 22-year-old mother from New Jersey, began a 59-day journey from New York to San Francisco accompanied by three companions, none of whom could drive, becoming the first woman to drive across the United States and arriving three weeks ahead of schedule.

1952: Michael J. Fox was born in Edmonton, Canada. After three Emmy Awards for Family Ties and worldwide fame for Back to the Future, he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease at 29 and has spent the decades since raising over $2 billion through his foundation to fund research into a cure. He turns 65 today.

1973: Secretariat won the Belmont Stakes by 31 lengths, completing the first Triple Crown in 25 years in what is considered the greatest performance in horse racing history. His final time of 2:24 remains the track record more than 50 years later.

1891: Cole Porter was born in Peru, Indiana, going on to write more than 1,500 songs including Night and Day, I've Got You Under My Skin, and Anything Goes, becoming one of the most witty and sophisticated composers Broadway has ever produced.

— William James

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:

🔬 The mRNA Revolution Is Just Beginning: The vaccine platform developed during COVID is now being adapted to create universal flu vaccines, personalized cancer treatments, and vaccines against entire families of viruses, with multiple programs in human trials and a new era of medicine potentially within reach this decade.

🏥 Regenerating What We Lose: Scientists can now grow functioning patches of heart muscle, liver tissue, and corneas from a patient's own stem cells, with clinical applications for heart disease, liver failure, and blindness already in use or in advanced trials, turning what was once science fiction into routine medicine.

🧪 Food Without Farmland: Precision fermentation and cellular agriculture companies are now producing real meat proteins, dairy, and complex food ingredients using microbial fermentation rather than animals or vast tracts of land, with products commercially available in multiple countries and costs falling rapidly every year.

🔭 Listening to the Universe: A new generation of radio telescopes and signal processing techniques has expanded the search for extraterrestrial intelligence from a handful of monitored star systems to millions simultaneously, making the search more systematic and comprehensive than at any point in human history.

🌿 The Ozone Layer Is Healing: The Montreal Protocol, signed in 1987, has so dramatically reduced ozone-depleting substances that scientists now project the ozone layer to return to pre-1980 levels by 2066, widely described as the most successful international environmental agreement in history and proof that global cooperation can reverse environmental damage.

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