He promised his great-granddaughter he'd attend her graduation from his med school. 60 years later, he was there

Happy Monday. Hope the weekend was good to you. Today's lead story is about Dr. Westel Creager, who is 97, started his adult life as a carpenter, put himself through medical school as the oldest in his class and made a promise to his great-granddaughter decades ago. If she got into his med school, he'd be there when she graduated. She got in. He showed up.

We also have rescued orangutans in Sumatra who are now raising babies in the wild, a radiation-free lung scan that finds things CT scans miss in children, and a cat named Toast Malone who survived a 4-alarm fire by hiding in a closet for 72 hours.

Here's your good news.

—Stephanie S

Westel Creager started his adult life as a carpenter. Tired of being poor, he went back to school in his late thirties as the oldest student in his class at the University of Kentucky College of Medicine. He graduated, worked emergency rooms into his 70s, flew a plane with the Good Samaritans into Mexico to treat underserved patients, and opened an AIDS hospital. When his great-granddaughter Haiden was heading to college, he made her a deal: get into medical school and he would be there when she graduated.

She got in — at his alma mater. As she moved through training, Westel stayed determined. His family had a white doctor's coat ready for the ceremony this summer. He is 97.

He showed up. Minutes after he put on his coat, he watched Haiden receive hers. In the Instagram video, he sits quietly and whispers three words: "I'm overwhelmed."

"He says it's the key to staying young and sharp," said his granddaughter Kristi Johnson. "'You are never too old, so keep pushing yourself, keep taking the stairs, adding new hobbies, and changing your path if needed.'" Watch the video.

Fifteen years ago, conservationists began releasing rescued Sumatran orangutans into the Jantho Pine Forest Nature Reserve in Indonesia's Aceh province, a protected area where no orangutans were living. Some had been orphaned. Others had spent months or years in rehabilitation after rescue from captivity. The question was whether animals that had lost so much could find their way back to a wild life.

The answer is yes. Since 2011, the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme has brought nearly 200 orangutans to Jantho. The ones released have not simply survived — they have begun raising families. At least 10 babies have now been born in the reserve, born wild, to mothers who themselves were once rescued. Those mothers are teaching their young how to forage, build nests, and navigate the forest canopy, exactly what their own mothers would have taught them.

The Sumatran orangutan is one of the world's most critically endangered great apes, with one of the longest birth intervals of any mammal. Every baby matters. What began as a refuge for broken animals has become something larger: a new wild population building itself one generation at a time. Watch the video and read the full story.

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For children with chronic lung conditions like cystic fibrosis, monitoring is a lifelong necessity. The problem is that the most detailed imaging available, CT scanning, exposes patients to ionizing radiation. For a child who needs scans repeated over years or decades, that exposure adds up in ways that matter.

Researchers at the University of Sheffield's POLARIS group have developed a workaround using hyperpolarized Xenon-129 MRI. Patients inhale a specially prepared form of xenon gas, hold their breath for a few seconds while the scanner collects images, then breathe it out. The xenon creates a strong MRI signal inside the lungs — and because some of it dissolves into the bloodstream, the scan can simultaneously reveal ventilation, blood flow, lung structure, and gas exchange, all without a single unit of ionizing radiation. The scan takes as little as 4 seconds.

Sheffield Children's Hospital is already using the technique for cystic fibrosis patients, the first center of its kind in the UK, and has found lung abnormalities in children that previous CT scans had missed entirely. The team is now collaborating with GE HealthCare to retrofit existing MRI machines for xenon imaging, which would bring the technology to hospitals worldwide without requiring new equipment. "It could make revolutionary imaging available to more patients," said Professor Jim Wild, who leads the POLARIS research group. Read the full story.

A mechanical issue started a fire in a five-story apartment building in a Salt Lake City suburb last week, sending the structure ablaze within minutes. About 200 residents were evacuated. Toast Malone, a black and gray cat, was not among them. In the chaos, he had scurried behind a washing machine, and his owners had to flee without him. The fire raged for 60 hours.

Days passed. The Salt Lake County Animal Services put out a social media post. Hope became, as one responder put it, harder to hold on to. More than 72 hours after the fire began, rescuers made their way through the damaged building and found something in a closet. One of the few spaces the structure still had intact. Smoke had filled it. More than a hundred thousand gallons of water had been sprayed around it. Toast was alive inside.

"Toast the cat was safely reunited with a very grateful owner," the fire department wrote on Facebook. "Aside from being wet, cold and a little scared, was otherwise healthy." His owner Madison Stott had never given up. "I never lost hope that my baby was still alive," she wrote on Instagram. The reunion video has more than 30,000 likes. Animal Services officers worked four straight days alongside firefighters helping rescue and reunite pets from the building. Toast just happened to need the least help. Watch the reunion and read the full story.

🐦 UK: Chester Zoo has hatched five endangered secretarybird chicks in what conservationists are calling a major first, with the birds — known for their dramatic plumes and striking hunting style — successfully bred in captivity as part of a coordinated effort to protect the species from extinction.

🐕 USA: Dogs of all shapes and sizes competed at the annual World Dog Surfing Championship, where Rosie the golden retriever led the pack in one of the most joyful and improbably watchable sporting events of the summer. There's a video. You need to see it.

🦅 UK: Ospreys, which were nearly wiped out in Britain, are continuing their comeback thanks to pioneering pairs that nest away from the main population, establishing new territories and raising chicks in places where no osprey had bred for generations.

📜 Egypt: Archaeologists excavating a Roman-era tomb have discovered a fragment of Homer's Iliad placed inside the abdomen of a 1,600-year-old mummy during embalming, the first time a literary text has ever been found incorporated into a mummification. University of Barcelona.

🧠 USA: Stanford researchers have found that large numbers of immune cells from the blood begin flooding into the aging brain as early as middle age, overturning the long-held view that the brain is largely isolated from the body's immune system, and opening new avenues for treating Alzheimer's. Published in Nature.

On August 17, 1959, Miles Davis released Kind of Blue, the album that would become the best-selling jazz record of all time. Nearly 5 million copies sold. Certified quadruple platinum. Named by critics as one of the greatest albums ever made in any genre. What makes the achievement more remarkable is how it was created: Davis called almost no rehearsal, gave his musicians only brief sketches of scales and melody lines the morning of recording, and asked them to improvise. The entire album was recorded in two days. Several musicians later said they barely knew what they were playing until they were playing it.

The musicians playing alongside Davis that week are now legends: tenor saxophonist John Coltrane, alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, pianists Bill Evans and Wynton Kelly, bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Jimmy Cobb. Davis was exploring what he called modal jazz, building music around scales rather than chord progressions, and the result opened entirely new territory in American music. "It was music made in heaven," Coltrane said afterward, "a gift to the world."

Other notable August 17 events:

1945: George Orwell published Animal Farm, 81 years ago today, the allegorical novella he wrote to reflect events leading up to the Russian Revolution and the Stalinist era, which was rejected by his own publisher before becoming one of the defining works of the 20th century.

1979: Monty Python's Life of Brian was released in theaters, 47 years ago today, immediately banned in Norway and promoted in Sweden with the tagline "So funny it was banned in Norway!" It has since been named the greatest comedy film of all time by multiple publications. "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" debuted in the film.

1907: Pike Place Market opened in Seattle, 119 years ago today, one of the longest-running farmers markets in the United States, now hosting more than 10 million visitors and 500 independent businesses annually.

1945: Indonesia declared independence from the Netherlands, 81 years ago today, with Mohammad Hatta and Sukarno reading a brief statement on the radio: "We the people of Indonesia hereby declare the independence of Indonesia." It sparked the four-year Indonesian Revolution of Independence.

— Confucius

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:

🧬 Medicine That Goes Straight to the Problem: Engineered nanoparticles loaded with cancer-fighting drugs can now be guided directly to tumor sites using molecular targeting or magnetic fields, delivering treatment precisely where it's needed while leaving surrounding healthy tissue largely unaffected.

🌊 Bringing the Kelp Forests Back: Marine scientists are successfully replanting giant kelp forests along coastlines where warming waters and sea urchin overpopulation had stripped them bare, with restoration programs in California, Australia, and Norway rebuilding complex ecosystems that support thousands of species.

🔭 Mining Water on the Moon: Missions are now mapping water ice deposits near the Moon's poles in unprecedented detail, with plans to extract and convert that ice into drinking water, oxygen, and rocket fuel — potentially supplying everything humans would need for a sustained presence on the lunar surface.

🌱 Protein From Insects at Scale: Commercial farms raising crickets, black soldier flies, and mealworms across Europe and North America are converting organic waste into high-protein food using a fraction of the land, water, and energy that conventional livestock requires, with products now reaching mainstream grocery shelves.

🔬 Sailing on Sunlight: Spacecraft propelled by the pressure of sunlight on ultrathin reflective sails are demonstrating that fuel-free propulsion across the solar system is achievable, and researchers are now exploring whether focused laser beams could one day accelerate such craft to nearby star systems within a human lifetime.

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