She spotted a disabled veteran limping across the tarmac and posted a video. Strangers raised $180,000 to help him retire

Happy Friday. Today's lead story is about a woman named LaCinda Thackery who was sitting on a plane at LAX and spotted an airport worker limping across the tarmac. She didn't know his name or his story. She just knew she had to do something. What happened next genuinely restored my faith in the internet.

We also have a 14-year-old rodeo kid in Montana who used a lasso to pull a drowning man out of the Yellowstone River, new research showing Africa's wildfire season is getting shorter, and the first time since the pandemic that less than 8% of the world's population is going to bed hungry.

Have a wonderful weekend

—Stephanie S

LaCinda Thackery was sitting on a plane at Los Angeles International Airport when she noticed a man on the tarmac below, moving slowly and painfully between aircraft. He was a fuel mechanic. He could barely walk. She didn't know his name, his age, or his story. She took a video, posted it to TikTok, and wrote a simple caption: "Does anyone know this man? Watching him work so hard, he could barely move, barely walk. Truly broke my heart. I know there has to be a way we can help him retire."

His name is James Blair. He is 64, a Navy veteran who served from 1980 to 1990, and has worked at John Wayne Airport in Orange County since 2006. His knees have deteriorated to the point where he can barely walk, but he cannot retire because his income supports his elderly mother's hospice care. He had no smartphone, no social media. A commenter on TikTok recognized him from the video. His boss drove 90 minutes to Blair's home to help him set up a GoFundMe, which Thackery then shared to her millions of viewers.

Six thousand strangers donated. The fund crossed $180,000. Thackery met Blair in person and handed him a check for $174,000. He later sent her a bouquet of flowers addressed to "the Angel." "I believed in God, but I didn't really believe in God," he told her. "But now, with the angel sitting next to you, it's amazing. When they're giving money they really can't spare, that amazes me. I'm just blown away."

"I felt like the world showed up," Thackery said afterward. Blair hasn't retired just yet. But he has bought himself a new bed. Watch the KSL News story and read more.

Jory Thomas had been obsessed with roping cattle all summer. Every afternoon when it cooled off, he would practice on a roping dummy in the yard. He had started going to brandings that year, throwing a lariat with improving confidence. He was 14, a ranch kid from Big Timber, Montana, spending the 4th of July weekend at his grandparents' house on the Yellowstone River near Greycliff.

Then he heard screaming. A raft and paddle board had struck a bridge pier and thrown four people into the river. Three made it to shore. A fourth was clinging to a cooler, moving swiftly downriver toward a section of rapids and logjams that his father, a veteran volunteer firefighter, knew well enough to fear. Jory emptied his pockets, took his lariat, and waded out chest-deep into the current. On his first throw, he caught the man around the arm and neck. A bystander helped reel him in.

His father had called 911 the moment the screaming started. A sheriff's deputy arrived in three minutes. By then there was almost nothing to see. "My opinion, Jory saved the individual's life, 100%," said Sweet Grass County Sheriff Alan Ronneberg. His grandmother Sandy was on the bank. "He comes up, and he said, 'I think I just saved a life,'" she told KTVQ. "And we all said, 'Yeah, you did.'" Watch the KTVQ story here.

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Africa is the world's wildfire capital. Seventy percent of all wildfires on Earth occur there during its two dry seasons, producing roughly half of all global CO2 emissions from fire. It's a staggering concentration of combustion on a single continent, and it's one that gets far less attention than fires in California, Australia, or the Amazon.

Which makes a new finding from Chinese Academy of Sciences researchers all the more striking. An analysis of rainfall records across Africa from 1990 to 2023, compared with satellite fire observations from 2003 to 2022, found that rains have been trending toward later cessation dates, delaying the onset of the dry season when parched grasses need only a single spark to burn for days. The effect is measurable: the dry season is beginning approximately 1.75 days later per decade in Northern Hemisphere Africa, and 0.4 days later per decade in the south.

The result is "widespread declines in burned area across Africa from 2003 to 2022," the authors wrote, with the strongest reductions happening during the peak fire months of December in the north and August in the south. The wet season isn't getting longer or wetter, just shifting slightly later, giving the land less time to dry out before the next rains arrive. Published in Geophysical Research Letters. Read the full story.

In 1970, nearly 35% of people living outside Europe and North America were malnourished. That number has been falling for decades, through famines, recessions, conflicts, and a global pandemic that sent it briefly back up. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization's State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2026 report, it now stands at 7.8%, the first time it has dropped below 8% since COVID-19 disrupted global food systems.

The decline is being driven by a steep five-year fall in Asia, where the most dramatic progress has unfolded in Central Asia, with malnourishment dropping from 7.7% to 2.8% since 2010, matching levels typically seen in high-income countries. Southeast Asia fell from 11.6% to 5.1% over the same period. The Caribbean and Latin America have also seen meaningful reductions over the same five years. This is the third consecutive year that the global figure has declined.

Africa remains the most undernourished continent, with averages above 20% in some regions, concentrated overwhelmingly in active conflict zones. The FAO projects the global figure will fall another 20% by the end of the decade, which would represent the lowest level of hunger ever recorded in human history. It won't be zero. But it will be a number that would have seemed impossible not long ago. Read the full story.

🪨 Global: New research has found that spreading crushed basalt rock on newly-planted forests significantly boosts carbon sequestration while simultaneously releasing nutrients that accelerate tree growth, strengthening the case for enhanced rock weathering as an affordable and scalable climate solution.

🌿 Brazil: Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon fell to its lowest level in a decade in the first half of 2026, with 38% less forest cleared than the same period in 2025, and the area affected by fire nearly 40% smaller than the 13-year historic average.

💊 USA: A 3-year randomized trial of 16,000+ older adults found that those taking a daily multivitamin reported significantly better functional health, including less fatigue, less shortness of breath, and greater ability to walk, climb stairs, and complete everyday tasks, compared to those on a placebo.

🏛️ Global: A University of York study of ancient Mohenjo-daro has found that as the 4,000-year-old Indus city grew more prosperous, its inequality actually decreased, with house sizes becoming more equal over time, suggesting shared infrastructure and collective governance can drive prosperity without concentrating wealth in the hands of a few.

📡 Global: Astronomers have used archived ALMA telescope data to conduct the first SETI survey of higher radio frequencies that have been almost completely unexplored — finding that existing observations may have quietly swept past 6 million stars without anyone realizing it, and that decades of alien-signal searches may have been tuned to the wrong channel.

On July 31, 1968, The Beatles gathered at Trident Studios in London to record the master track of a new Paul McCartney song. McCartney had written it for Julian Lennon, John's five-year-old son, to comfort him during his parents' divorce. He had called it "Hey Jules" in the car on the way to visit the boy. By the time it was released, the name had become "Hey Jude," and it would spend nine weeks at number one on the US charts, the longest run of any Beatles single in history.

The recording required a 36-piece orchestra, not a particularly enthusiastic one. Some of the classically-trained musicians were "looking down their noses at the Beatles," as one account put it. To lift the energy in the room, McCartney stood up on the grand piano and began conducting from there. At the end of the session, the Beatles asked the orchestra to clap along and sing during the four-minute coda. All but one complied. The holdout reportedly said: "I'm not going to clap my hands and sing Paul McCartney's bloody song."

Other notable July 31 events:

1991: US President George H.W. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, known as START, 35 years ago today, reducing both countries' nuclear warheads by approximately one-third after decades of Cold War mistrust and arms buildup.

1786: Robert Burns published Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, the Kilmarnock Edition, 240 years ago today, catapulting him to national fame and giving the world "To a Mouse," including the line "The best laid plans of mice and men oft go awry."

1893: The Gaelic League, Conradh na Gaeilge, was founded in Dublin, 133 years ago today, by Douglas Hyde and Eoin MacNeill to preserve the Irish language from extinction. It ultimately succeeded in making Irish an official language of the European Union.

2012: American swimmer Michael Phelps won his 19th Olympic medal, 14 years ago today, breaking a record held for 48 years by Russian gymnast Larisa Latynina and becoming the most decorated Olympic athlete in history.

— Pablo Picasso

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:

🧬 Medicines That Silence Bad Genes: RNA interference drugs, including siRNA and antisense oligonucleotides, are entering clinical trials for conditions from high cholesterol to Huntington's disease, working by silencing faulty genetic instructions directly rather than trying to block the proteins those instructions produce.

🔬 Touching Cells Without Touching Them: Precisely tuned ultrasound waves can now levitate, sort, and manipulate individual cells and particles without any physical contact, enabling new techniques for building tissue layer by layer, separating cancer cells from blood samples, and delivering drugs to exact locations in the body.

🔭 Reading the Chemistry of Distant Worlds: The Webb Space Telescope is now routinely detecting the chemical fingerprints of exoplanet atmospheres, identifying water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, and other compounds in planets dozens of light-years away, turning alien air into something we can actually analyze.

🌱 Packaging That Disappears in Weeks: Mycelium packaging, grown from mushroom roots and agricultural waste, is now commercially available as a fully compostable alternative to polystyrene foam, breaking down in weeks rather than the centuries conventional plastic takes to decompose.

🌊 Electricity From Waves: Oscillating water column devices and point absorber buoys are converting ocean wave energy into electricity at demonstration scale in Portugal, Australia, and the US, adding a renewable source that complements wind and solar with a different seasonal and daily rhythm.

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