He was 4 years old, lonely, and new to the neighborhood. So he waved at everyone who walked by

Happy Monday. Today's lead story is about a 4-year-old in North Carolina named Roman who started waving at everyone who walked past his house, the garbage man, the Amazon driver, the neighbors his mom didn't know. What happened next is one of those stories that will stay with you.

We also have a King's College drug that may repair DNA damage at the earliest stages of Alzheimer's and has already passed human safety trials, the Spanish donkeys that have kept Doñana National Park fire-free for nine years straight, and a London daughter who posted one TikTok about her dad's shoe shop and created two-hour lines out the door.

Here's your good news.

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—Stephanie S

Roman, from Concord, North Carolina, is a happy kid who loves sports. But when his parents divorced and his dad moved away, something shifted. His grandparents lived out of state. His world got smaller. So every morning, he stood by the door and waved at whoever walked past: the garbage man, the Amazon driver, the neighbors his mom Anna had never actually met. He wasn't trying to build anything. He was just a small boy saying hello.

Wade Folger, a retired man who lived next door, was one of the first to wave back. Then he came over to talk. Then he started asking Roman if he wanted to hang out. One by one, other neighbors followed. What had been a street of strangers became something else. Roman invited his new senior friends to his swim meets, his basketball games, his soccer matches, his preschool open house. When his birthday came around, his mom knew exactly who to call.

CBS News correspondent Steve Hartman brought the neighbors together for his "On the Road" segment and asked them what it had been like. Most of them, it turned out, hadn't known each other either before Roman. Now they wave at each other, just like he did. "Look at what this little kid has built," one said. "If the world was like this child," said the oldest among them, "what an awesome, awesome place it would be."

Anna watched all of it unfold from her front step. "I just saw that my son was happy," she said. Sometimes that's enough to change everything. Watch the CBS News story.

Most Alzheimer's drug development has targeted amyloid and tau, the toxic proteins that accumulate in the brain as the disease progresses. Those approaches have had limited clinical success. A team at King's College London took a different path: targeting DNA damage and inflammation, two processes that occur at the very earliest stages of Alzheimer's, before the hallmark proteins even fully take hold.

Their drug, KCL-286, was originally developed for spinal cord injury and has already cleared Phase 1 human safety and tolerability trials. In mouse models of Alzheimer's, it repaired DNA double-strand breaks and reduced inflammation simultaneously. "DNA double-strand breaks are like a rope snapping completely in two," said Professor Jonathan Corcoran of King's College. "KCL-286 promotes repair of these breaks, allowing us to target a key feature of Alzheimer's disease."

Because KCL-286 has already passed Phase 1 trials, it dramatically cuts the normal multi-year development timeline for a new drug. "To develop an effective treatment for Alzheimer's disease, we need to tackle multiple aspects of the disease," said first author Natasha Hill. "KCL-286 was able to target multiple disease-relevant pathways, some of which are initiated very early in the disease course." Read the full story.

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Doñana National Park in Andalusia is one of Europe's most biodiverse ecosystems, a refuge for Iberian lynx and migrating birds from two continents. It also hasn't had a wildfire in nine years. The reason is three donkeys named Leonor, Ainoa, and Ume, who graze freely across a 130 to 150-foot fire break every day from March to November, seven hours a day, drinking eight gallons of water each.

The concept is unglamorous and effective. A donkey weighs three times as much as a goat and eats ten times more. It breaks up vegetation physically as it moves, creating a more thorough fire break than smaller grazers. Following Andalusia's lead, Galicia, Catalonia, Ourense, Navarre, and the Basque Country have all recruited their own donkey brigades. Joan Cedó, who launched Catalonia's Tivissa Donkeys Firefighters program in 2020, is direct about the results: "Since we introduced donkeys in our municipality, there have been no wildfires."

The deeper story is about what happens when a landscape loses its grazers. Rural depopulation removed working donkeys from Spain's forests over the past century. Understory vegetation exploded. Summers got hotter and drier. The same land that donkeys grazed for millennia became a tinderbox. Bringing them back is less an innovation than a restoration. Read the full story.

Rachid Lazraq has owned Rich Collection Italia on Hackney Road in Shoreditch for more than 30 years. The shop sells vintage Italian shoes and has a loyal following or had one, until online shopping and an aging clientele slowly eroded the foot traffic. A closing sale sign went up. Then his 25-year-old daughter Zineb, a London journalist, noticed that a French influencer had posted about a pair of Y2K kitten heels from her dad's shop. She decided to do the same.

Her video went up on July 7th. It got 300,000 views overnight. Within days there were two-hour lines snaking out the door. Young shoppers who had never heard of the shop were coming in daily. Rachid ripped down the closing sale sign while surrounded by applauding customers.

"My dad has been running this shop since before I was born, so we were all sad to see it suffering," Zineb said. "By highlighting the shoes that would appeal to people my age, we had lines out of the shop in no time." Rachid, who is nearing retirement age, now wants to go out with a bang rather than a closing sale, and the shop is considering moving into online sales to reach its new, younger customer base. Read the full story.

🐟 China/Russia: Chinese and Russian biologists have released nearly 500,000 young sturgeon into the Amur River, one of the world's great river systems, as part of a joint conservation effort to rebuild populations of one of the planet's most ancient and critically endangered fish.

🌿 Uganda: Scientists have confirmed that a lotion made from homegrown catnip is an effective mosquito repellent in rural Uganda, offering communities a low-cost, locally grown alternative to imported chemical repellents for reducing mosquito-borne disease.

⏰ Spain: A 12-week program of 16:8 intermittent fasting maintained meaningful weight loss a full year after the program ended, regardless of whether participants ate early or late in the day, with one in three choosing to continue fasting independently.

🐺 USA: Four litters of red wolf pups have been born in the wild in North Carolina this year, with 12 to 16 pups surviving, in a new milestone for the world's most endangered wolf and the only wild red wolf population on Earth.

🐝 Singapore: Armed with just a bandana and his bare hands, 42-year-old Clarence Chua has safely relocated over 6 million bees one nest at a time over six years, convincing Singapore residents to save rather than exterminate, and including one rescue from a plane engine that couldn't take off.

On July 20, 1969, the Apollo 11 lunar module touched down on the Sea of Tranquility with just 30 seconds of fuel remaining, having manually piloted past an unexpected boulder field. Mission Control held its breath. Then: "Houston, the Eagle has landed." At 10:56 p.m. EDT, Neil Armstrong descended the ladder and became the first human to stand on another world. More than half a billion people watched him say: "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." Buzz Aldrin followed and described what he saw as "magnificent desolation."

They spent two and a half hours on the surface, collected samples, planted a flag, and left a plaque: "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon. July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind." Kennedy had set the challenge eight years earlier. Four hundred thousand people made it happen, with five months to spare.

Other notable July 20 events:

1926: The Methodist Church voted to allow women to become priests, 100 years ago today, making it one of the earliest major Protestant denominations to formally open ordination to women.

1985: Treasure hunter Mel Fisher discovered the main cargo of the sunken 1622 Spanish galleon Nuestra Señora de Atocha, 41 years ago today, 40 miles off Key West: 40 tons of gold and silver, 114,000 silver pieces of eight, Colombian emeralds, and 1,000 silver ingots, worth an estimated $450 million. His daily motto for 16 years of searching: "Today's the Day."

2005: Canada became the fourth country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage, 21 years ago today.

1976: Olympic gymnast Shun Fujimoto broke his knee during the floor exercise at Montreal, 50 years ago today, then scored 9.5 on the pommel horse and 9.7 on the rings, dismounted from eight feet onto his fractured knee, stuck the landing, and helped Japan win the team gold medal.

— Mother Teresa

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:

🌊 Solar Power on Water: Floating solar panels deployed on reservoirs and lakes generate clean electricity while simultaneously reducing water evaporation by up to 70%, protecting against drought and outperforming land-based panels thanks to the natural cooling effect of the water beneath them.

🧬 mRNA Is Just Getting Started: The Nobel Prize-winning mRNA technology that transformed COVID-19 vaccination is now being developed for personalized cancer vaccines, HIV treatments, and therapies for rare genetic diseases, extending a platform that may prove to be one of the most versatile medical tools ever invented.

🔬 Superconductors Creeping Toward Room Temperature: Multiple research teams have achieved superconductivity at progressively higher temperatures, with recent materials demonstrating zero electrical resistance under conditions closer to what could eventually be achieved without extreme cooling, edging toward a transformation of electricity grids, quantum computers, and medical imaging.

🧠 Wearables That Read Your Emotions: Devices using EEG sensors, heart rate variability, and skin conductance can now reliably detect emotional states including stress, focus, and calm in real time, opening new possibilities for mental health monitoring and human-computer interaction.

🌱 Crops Built for Drought: Gene editing techniques including CRISPR are producing wheat, maize, and sorghum varieties that maintain yields under severe water stress, with field trials in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia showing drought-tolerant crops outperforming conventional varieties by up to 40% in dry conditions.

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