At 91, Dale Sanders just became the oldest person to hike the Appalachian Trail

Good morning and happy Friday. September 11 is a day to pause, remember, and be grateful for the people around us. Today's newsletter feels right for it.

Dale Sanders is 91, born in Kentucky before the Appalachian Trail route was even finished. He just completed it for the second time after 359 days, 71 falls, and one very persuasive wife. We also have humanity's third-ever visit to Mercury, a diamond heist solved by a hungry cleaning lady, and an indie artist whose entire stock sold out overnight because one person stopped at his booth.

Have a good weekend.

—Stephanie S

In a historic first, a baby girl with an otherwise incurable neurodegenerative disease is thriving thanks to a custom-made gene therapy — developed just for her.

Born with a rare mutation that typically leads to severe brain damage and early death, the child received a one-of-a-kind genetic treatment designed specifically for her condition. The therapy was developed in record time by a team of scientists and clinicians in the Netherlands, in collaboration with her parents. And incredibly, just six months later, her symptoms have disappeared.

Dubbed “Milasen 2.0”, in reference to another early gene therapy success story, this treatment marks a major milestone in personalized medicine. While it’s still too soon to call it a cure, experts say it’s a glimpse into the future of how we might treat ultra-rare diseases.

It’s a story of science, love, and the power of refusing to give up.

Mercury is the least understood planet in the inner solar system. Despite being our closest neighbor for much of the year, it takes roughly as long to reach as Pluto, because the Sun's gravity makes any direct course impossible. BepiColombo, the joint mission of the European Space Agency and Japan's JAXA, spent more than 8 years and 6 billion miles completing 9 planetary flybys just to slow down enough to approach it.

On September 3rd, the mission reached its first milestone. The Mercury Transfer Module, the propulsion unit that had powered the spacecraft through years of gravitational interference, successfully separated from the science stack after bringing the probe within 1.8 million miles of the planet. The separation was confirmed to cheers at mission control in Darmstadt, Germany, and described by ESA as "one of the most complex planetary arrival sequences ever attempted."

"After all this waiting and preparation, we all looked at each other and hugged," said Emmanuela Bordoni, ESA's BepiColombo B-shift Spacecraft Operations Manager. "It was a very powerful moment." The two remaining science modules, Mio and MPO, will enter polar orbit around Mercury on November 26th. Primary science begins in April 2027. BepiColombo will study Mercury's magnetic field, its iron-rich core, its volcanic history, and the origin of its mysterious surface ridges, questions that Mariner 10 and MESSENGER left unanswered.

Two months before Suzanne Schiltz took an apple from a hotel guest's suitcase, two amateur thieves had climbed a ladder into the Château de Chantilly, about 30 miles north of Paris, and walked out with the Grand Condé diamond and 74 other pieces of jewelry. The diamond was pink, the size of a lima bean, and valued at $3 million in 1920s dollars. The thieves could not sell it. No jeweler or pawnbroker in France would touch something so famous. The diamond sat, unfenced, for two months.

Then Schiltz, a chambermaid in Paris exhausted from cleaning the rooms of the most-visited city in the world, spotted an apple in a guest's suitcase and decided to take it. She bit down. Her teeth hit something solid. She stared down in disbelief at a pink gemstone lodged inside the apple the size of a lima bean. The police, when they questioned the burglar, asked: "Do you like apples?" He said: "Why?" The officer answered: "You have one with queer seeds in your case."

One hundred years later, the Musée Condé and the Château de Chantilly are putting the Grand Condé on public display for the first time since the heist, from October 17th to January 3rd. Gemologists from the School of Jewelry Arts of Paris have conducted scientific analysis of the stone's chemical composition, rarity, clarity, and density, creating what Mathieu Deldicque, chief heritage curator of the Musée Condé, calls an identity card: so that even if the stone were stolen again, cut in half, or reshaped, any jeweler in the world would know exactly what it was.

The account @slow_comics has 40,000 followers on TikTok, earned through a simple and stubborn habit: visiting comic book convention booths that no one else is stopping at. At a recent convention in New York, the account's creator stopped at the booth of Dare, an American artist of Nigerian heritage who was selling a self-published comic called Ori: Holder of the Heads, a Yoruba fantasy about a world where people can speak to their ancestors. Dare also published a side story called Etch, which can be read from left to right or right to left, with each direction revealing a different perspective in the same argument. @slow_comics bought both, filmed a video, and posted it.

The video was liked by 1 million people. Twenty-five thousand new followers arrived at Dare's creator account overnight. Every available copy of Ori sold out. The limited presale sold out. Dare called his brother Joshua in Pennsylvania and asked him to drive to New York with the remaining physical copies. Those sold out too. "Due to the virality of the video," @slow_comics noted in a follow-up, "he sold out basically overnight."

Dare, whose TikTok is @Oridipe, recorded a video thanking the community and explaining how collectors could get in on the next wave of editions. He and his comics will be at the Small Press Expo in Bethesda, Maryland on September 12th and 13th, and at the Uhuru Book Fair in Clark Park, Philadelphia the following weekend.

🦠 Global: A short course of immunotherapy before bowel cancer surgery kept patients cancer-free for nearly three years with zero relapses in the NEOPRISM-CRC trial led by UCL and UCLH, compared to a 25% relapse rate under standard care. "Cancer melted away."

💪 Global: A Newcastle University review finds that strength training is the most effective exercise for protecting independence as we age, specifically because muscle provides the balance, joint stability, and resilience that daily life actually requires, not cardiovascular fitness alone.

🐊 Global: Saltwater crocodiles that spent up to 22 years in captivity settled into wild home ranges in Bangladesh's Sundarbans and showed no inclination to return to their breeding facility, offering a promising new strategy for conservation programs trying to rebuild critically low wild populations. Murdoch University, Wildlife Research.

💊 Global: The STAREE trial, the first large statin primary prevention trial in older adults, found that atorvastatin 40mg daily reduced major cardiovascular events by 30% in adults aged 70 and over with no prior CVD, diabetes, or dementia, over a median of six years. ESC Congress 2026, published in NEJM.

🔬 Global: Scientists have finally explained how Spirostomum, a single-celled organism barely visible to the naked eye, contracts its body 200 times faster than the human eye can blink using a calcium-activated protein network rather than conventional muscle fibers, revealing a completely new mechanism of ultrafast movement.

On September 11, 1961, a small group of committed conservationists founded the World Wildlife Fund with a simple conviction: that the natural world needed advocates who could work across borders and beyond politics. They chose a giant panda as their symbol, partly because pandas were already beloved worldwide and partly because black-and-white print reproduction was cheap. The logo has barely changed since.

Sixty-five years later, WWF has 35 million supporters and offices in nearly 100 countries. It helped establish the Galapagos National Park. It created the world's first eco-labels for food and consumer products. It has worked to conserve pandas, tigers, rhinoceroses, and elephants, and pioneered the use of debt-for-nature swaps that have protected millions of acres across Africa. From protecting individual species, it has grown into one of the most consequential conservation organizations in the history of environmental advocacy.

Other notable September 11 events:

1962: The Beatles recorded "Love Me Do" at EMI Studios in London, 64 years ago today, the first single that launched one of the greatest careers in the history of popular music.

1978: President Carter, Egyptian President Sadat, and Israeli Prime Minister Begin agreed on a framework for peace in the Middle East at Camp David, 48 years ago today.

2001: Gerard Way was waiting for a train in New York City on his way to work as a comic illustrator 25 years ago today when he witnessed the World Trade Center collapse, and decided that day to start My Chemical Romance. "I need to do something that means something," he said, "or my life will mean nothing."

1945: The first successful kidney dialysis was performed by Willem J. Kolff, 81 years ago today, using a machine built partly from orange juice cans, auto parts, and sausage casings, launching a treatment that has since saved millions of lives.

— Helen Keller

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:

🔬 Robots That Run on Real Muscle: Engineers are building soft robots powered by biological muscle tissue grown in the lab, combining the precision of engineered structures with the efficiency and adaptability of living tissue, with applications in minimally invasive surgery, prosthetics, and environmental sensing that rigid machines simply cannot match.

🌱 A Pharmacy That Lives Inside You: Scientists are engineering bacteria to live permanently in the human gut and produce therapeutic molecules on demand, from anti-inflammatory compounds to insulin to cancer-fighting agents, turning the microbiome into a programmable internal pharmacy that responds to the body's needs in real time.

💻 Chips That Think Like Neurons: Neuromorphic computer chips that mimic the structure of biological neurons are now being deployed in hearing aids, cameras, and edge devices, processing information with a fraction of the energy that conventional silicon chips require, pointing toward AI systems that run on a watch battery rather than a data center.

🌊 Fresh Water From the Sea: Engineers have developed new membrane materials that can desalinate seawater at a fraction of the energy cost of conventional reverse osmosis systems, bringing large-scale freshwater production from the ocean within practical reach for coastal communities already facing serious water scarcity.

🍄 The Underground Carbon Vault: Scientists have discovered that the vast networks of fungi connecting plant root systems across forests and grasslands store far more carbon in the soil than previously understood, and are now developing land management practices that protect these invisible networks to dramatically increase their carbon sequestration potential.

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