He turned down half a billion dollars and gave the company to charity instead

Happy Thursday. Today's lead story is about Eddie Smith Jr., who spent 58 years running a boat company he saved from bankruptcy. He turned down offers approaching half a billion dollars. What he did instead is one of the best business stories I've read in years.

We also have HIV infections and AIDS deaths at their lowest levels in more than 30 years, self-healing contact lenses that repair scratches with an hour of UV light, and the longest predator exclusion fence in the Pacific, protecting Hawaii's rarest seabirds.

Happy reading.

—Stephanie S

Eddie Smith Jr. grew up near the poverty line, eating SPAM three times a week, lying about his age to get a paper route. He was the first in his family to graduate college. In 1965 he went to work for a boat company called Grady-White that was on the edge of bankruptcy. He would not leave for 58 years.

Working 80 to 100 hours a week, Smith turned Grady-White into a $100 million revenue business and received multiple acquisition offers approaching half a billion dollars. He turned them all down. He had watched too many peers sell and regret it. "All of them were really disappointed in what happened to their companies after the sale," he told Fortune. "They lost their culture that they had built, and I just couldn't bear the thought of that happening."

Inspired by Yvon Chouinard's decision to give Patagonia to a conservation trust, Smith signed Grady-White's controlling shares to a purpose trust that can never be sold. The non-voting shares went to a 501(c)4 whose profits flow entirely to charity in perpetuity, with employee profit sharing and education resources built in.

"I just think that those of us fortunate enough to be in a position to help others — it's really a gift to me to be able to do what I do." Fifty-eight years. Half a billion left on the table. Read the full story.

At the 26th International AIDS Conference in Rio de Janeiro, UNAIDS released a special report showing new HIV infections and AIDS-related deaths have fallen to their lowest levels since the early 1990s. Seven countries, including Kenya, Rwanda, and Zimbabwe, achieved an almost 80% reduction in new infections since 2010. Eleven countries have now hit the "95-95-95" targets: 95% of people living with HIV know their status, 95% of those diagnosed are on antiretroviral therapy, and 95% of those on treatment are virally suppressed.

The report also highlighted what's coming. A twice-yearly injection called lenacapavir, which GNN previously reported showed 0 HIV infections among 3,200 trial participants, is entering wider rollout. Monthly pills are in late-stage trials. "The world is on the cusp of an HIV prevention revolution," UNAIDS wrote, "in prevention medicines which offer close to vaccine-like protection."

UNITAID and the Global Fund have committed to reaching 3 million people with lenacapavir by 2028. Brazil expanded access to prevention medicines by 41% in the past year. "Despite enormous challenges, ending AIDS is still within reach," said UNAIDS Executive Director Winnie Byanyima. Read the full story.

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Contact lens wearers know the problem: a scratch means a replacement. Lenses are fragile, replacements are expensive, and the waste adds up. Researchers in South Korea have developed a hydrogel lens that fixes itself when exposed to UV light at a wavelength of 365 nanometers, which sunlight produces naturally, in under an hour.

The mechanism is called disulfide exchange. When UV light hits the lens, sulfur bonds in the hydrogel temporarily break apart and reconnect with neighboring atoms, effectively closing the scratch. Before-and-after images released with the study show the surface damage disappearing almost entirely, with repaired scratches scoring just 2% on a perceptibility scale. The researchers also layered on an antibacterial coating that resists buildup even after contact with sandpaper, and found the lens retained moisture better than commercial options.

The team notes that eventually, wearers could repair lenses at home using the UV lamp from a nail polish curing kit or an indoor plant grow light. South Korean regulatory approval is still needed before market testing can begin. Published in ACS Applied Polymer Materials. Read the full story.

Kīlauea Point National Wildlife Refuge on Kauai's northern shore is prime nesting habitat for some of Hawaii's most endangered birds. It is also, without intervention, a death trap. Feral cats can leap four feet. Pigs burrow. Rats squeeze through almost anything. For decades, ground-nesting seabirds that landed on these hills were doing so in a place that doubled as a hunting ground.

In 2022, a 11,200-foot predator exclusion fence was completed around 168 acres of the refuge at a cost of $1.7 million, becoming the longest such fence in the Pacific. It was designed from the start to stop four predators: too high for a cat or fox to jump, capped with a claw-proof hood, fitted with a rubber skirt buried below the ground to stop pigs burrowing under, and built from metal mesh fine enough to stop even rats from slipping through. A similar fence on Oahu saw Newell's shearwater chick numbers quadruple within the first few years.

Four years on, the birds have found their way back. Newell's shearwaters, Hawaiian petrels, Laysan albatross, red-footed boobies, and great frigatebirds are nesting on hillsides that would have consumed them before. The fence also protects the Critically Endangered Hawaiian hoary bat and the nēnē, the Hawaiian state bird. The northern shore location has no light pollution to disorient the birds and no powerlines to collide with. Until the islands can fully control their invasive predators, the fence holds. Read the full story.

🦕 Global: A single fossil discovered in Australia has preserved a prehistoric predation chain three animals long — a pterosaur caught by an ichthyosaur, which was then caught by a pliosaur — a sequence scientists are calling a "3-Way Chompfest."

☀️ Global: On August 12, a total solar eclipse crossing parts of Europe will coincide with the peak of the Perseid meteor shower, with NASA predicting perfect dark New Moon skies and up to 100 meteors per hour. First total solar eclipse visible from mainland Europe since 1999.

🧠 Japan: Researchers at Nagoya University have identified orexin neurons as the brain's key driver of sustained motivation, finding they fire harder as a reward becomes more difficult to reach, pointing to new treatment targets for depression and addiction where motivation breaks down.

🕷️ Global: A 518-million-year-old sea creature called Urokodia has revealed the earliest known evidence of the structures that became spider fangs, filling a crucial gap in the evolutionary story of one of nature's most successful animal groups. Published in Nature.

🐊 USA: Georgia's Tellus Science Museum is now home to the world's first scientifically accurate mounted skeleton of Deinosuchus schwimmeri, a 31-foot "terror croc" that preyed on dinosaurs 76-83 million years ago, built from 40 years of research by the paleontologist for whom it was named.

On August 6, 1991, Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist working at CERN in Switzerland, published a document describing his invention of the World Wide Web. He had designed and built the first web browser to access the new information management system, creating the Hypertext Transfer Protocol that would allow any computer anywhere in the world to contact any server anywhere in the world. When he first proposed the idea to his manager, the response was famously understated: "vague, but exciting."

He gave it away for free. Berners-Lee made no attempt to patent or profit from the Web, choosing instead to release it as an open system available to everyone. He was later knighted for his contribution to human civilization. He remains the director of the World Wide Web Consortium, which continues to oversee the development of the technology that now connects more than five billion people. Everything you are reading right now exists because of what he published 35 years ago today.

Other notable August 6 events:

1926: Gertrude Ederle became the first woman to swim the English Channel, 100 years ago today, completing the crossing in a time that beat the existing men's record by nearly two hours. An Olympic champion and former world record-holder in five events, she was known as "The Queen of the Waves."

1965: The Voting Rights Act was signed into US law, 61 years ago today, prohibiting racial discrimination in voting and enforcing protections guaranteed by the 14th and 15th Amendments that had gone largely unenforced, particularly across the South.

1962: Jamaica formally declared independence from Britain, 64 years ago today, retaining membership in the Commonwealth of Nations and establishing a Westminster-style parliamentary system under the leadership of Norman Manley.

2012: NASA's Curiosity rover landed in Gale Crater on Mars, 14 years ago today, beginning what has become one of the most productive scientific missions in history. This week it sent back images of an extraordinary honeycomb landscape spreading across a Martian valley.

— Anne Frank

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:

🧬 Microbes as Factories: Engineered microbes are now producing chemicals, fuels, and medicines that previously required petroleum or complex chemical extraction, turning industrial fermentation tanks into biological factories that generate useful compounds from sugar rather than fossil fuels.

🔬 Sensors That Detect Almost Anything: Quantum sensors using the spin states of individual atoms can detect magnetic fields, gravitational anomalies, and chemical traces with sensitivity far beyond conventional instruments, enabling new tools for brain imaging, underground resource mapping, and early disease detection.

🌊 Giving Coastlines Back to Nature: Engineered oyster reefs, mangrove restoration, and living breakwaters are replacing concrete seawalls in coastal cities, providing erosion protection while simultaneously creating marine habitat, filtering water, and locking carbon into living tissue.

🔭 Mapping the Solar System's Treasure: Spacecraft equipped with spectrometers and radar are mapping the mineral composition of near-Earth asteroids in detail, building a catalog of platinum-group metals and water ice deposits that could eventually be extracted for use both in space and on Earth.

🌱 Grain That Grows Back Every Year: Scientists have developed perennial versions of wheat, rice, and sorghum that regrow from their roots without replanting, dramatically cutting soil erosion, water use, and the carbon cost of annual plowing across millions of acres of farmland.

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