The most North Atlantic right whale calves in 17 years were just born. Here's why it matters

Happy Wednesday. Today's issue is one of those where the variety genuinely delighted me as I was putting it together. We have baby whales, a rescued kitten, a man in East London who decided that throwing away a 105-year-old sequoia tree was simply not acceptable, and a battery technology that could change the economics of clean energy using one of the most abundant materials on earth.

Four completely different stories. One thing they have in common: someone paid attention when most people would have looked away.

Here's your good news.

👉 P.S. Good News Break has a community of readers who show up every weekday morning. If you'd like to be part of it for just $5 a month, you'll get Tuesday and Thursday paid issues too, with exclusive content that doesn't go to everyone.

—Stephanie S

Happy Wednesday. Today's issue is one of those where the variety genuinely delighted me as I was putting it together. We have baby whales, a rescued kitten, a man in East London who decided that throwing away a 105-year-old sequoia tree was simply not acceptable, and a battery technology that could change the economics of clean energy using one of the most abundant materials on earth.

Four completely different stories. One thing they have in common: someone paid attention when most people would have looked away.

Here's your good news.

—Stephanie S

The North Atlantic right whale is one of the most endangered large animals on earth. With fewer than 370 individuals remaining, every birth matters. This calving season, 23 calves were born along the southeastern US coastline, the highest number since 2009 and well above the recent average of around 15. It is a genuine milestone for a species that has been teetering for decades.

What makes the number more encouraging is what it suggests about population health. Twenty of the 23 new mothers were returning moms, and 13 of them last calved in 2021 or 2022, giving a calving interval of 3 to 4 years. That's close to the natural healthy interval, compared to the recent stressed average of 7 to 10 years. Shorter intervals suggest the whales are eating well, recovering well, and reproducing closer to their natural rhythm.

The season also produced 500 southward migration sightings of 129 individual whales, a 29% increase on last year. Many of those sightings came from citizens on recreational boats, contributing data to NOAA's monitoring program alongside professional surveys.

The right whale nearly went extinct twice, first from commercial whaling and then from fishing gear entanglement and ship strikes. Decades of conservation have bent the trajectory. This season is the clearest sign yet that it may be bending further. Read the full NOAA report and see the photos of the mother-calf pairs.

Joel De Mowbray kept watching irreplaceable materials, Victorian timber, handmade bricks, ornate ironwork, get skipped into landfill as London's construction industry churned through the city. More than half of all UK waste comes from construction. So he started intercepting it. He founded Yes Make and secured a 5-acre industrial site in Newham called Tipping Point East, now the largest building materials salvage operation in the UK.

When a 105-year-old sequoia from the Linford Arboretum was earmarked for waste, Yes Make organized a workshop to turn it into usable timber on site. Mahogany, teak, and afromasia rescued from the London Docklands have all found second lives there too. Salvaged components are certified and resold to contractors at sometimes one-tenth the price of new stock.

"We're creating a regenerative supply chain for the city we love," De Mowbray told the Guardian. "Turning things that would otherwise go to waste into objects that have cultural potential." Read the full story and see what a second life looks like.

Trooper Brody Schmitz was responding to a motorist who had pulled over on a ramp to I-90 in Wisconsin when she told him what she had just witnessed: someone had thrown kittens from a moving vehicle ahead of her. The offending car was gone. But a kitten was found on the roadside, a small tuxedo cat, frightened and alone.

Schmitz took the kitten to a nearby shelter to be cared for while he finished his shift. He told them he wanted to adopt him. He came back, named the kitten Toby, and took him home in his arms. The Wisconsin State Patrol shared the story on Facebook and the comment section filled with similar tales of officers who found their pets on duty.

"The cat distribution system works in mysterious ways," one commenter wrote. In this case it worked through a highway ramp, a passing motorist, and a trooper who showed up and didn't leave empty-handed. See the photo of Trooper Schmitz and Toby. It's a good one.

Lithium-ion batteries power almost everything from electric cars to grid storage, but lithium is expensive, geographically concentrated, and increasingly contested as a resource. Sodium, on the other hand, is one of the most abundant elements on earth. A new study from RWTH Aachen University in Germany has found that a commercial sodium-ion battery already being used in electric vehicles in China matches most of the performance parameters of Tesla's lithium-ion batteries, including uniformity, power capability, and low-temperature performance.

The battery was developed by HiNa, a spin-off of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and uses a tabless double-aluminum current collector design that mirrors Tesla's own architecture. Researchers tested 120 cells using impedance spectroscopy, X-ray imaging, and real-world temperature simulations from minus 20 to 45 degrees Celsius. Lead researcher Moritz Schütte called the cell uniformity positively surprising for an early commercial product.

The technology still has limitations: energy density lags behind the best lithium-ion cells and low-temperature charging needs improvement. But for grid storage, shorter-range vehicles, and commercial transport, sodium-ion is already competitive and potentially transformative. Sodium costs a fraction of lithium and exists everywhere. Read the full study and see what the battery revolution could look like.

🦆 Australia: For the first time in 50 years, platypuses are breeding in Royal National Park near Sydney, with the reintroduced population confirmed at 20 individuals and lead researcher Prof Gilad Bino declaring it no longer just a reintroduction but a recovering population.

🎸 Global: Today marks 49 years since Bob Marley released Exodus, named Album of the Century by TIME Magazine, a record whose message of freedom, dignity, and love has never stopped finding new listeners and whose influence on music and social justice continues to grow.

🐨 Australia: After a 13-year grassroots campaign, the Great Koala National Park is advancing toward formal establishment in New South Wales, with 476,000 hectares now under a timber moratorium and legislation being prepared to permanently protect habitat for 12,000 koalas and more than 100 threatened species.

🍽️ France: All university students in France can now eat a three-course lunch for just one euro, after the government expanded a scheme previously limited to low-income students, responding to surveys showing nearly half of French students have gone without food for financial reasons.

🦌 Kenya: Trail cameras set up in the Maasai Mau forest have captured photos of mountain bongos, one of Africa's most critically endangered antelopes, in an area where they were thought to be locally extinct, offering conservationists genuine hope for the species in a key habitat.

On this day 61 years ago, astronaut Ed White floated out of the Gemini 4 capsule above the Pacific Ocean and became the first American to walk in space. He was attached to the spacecraft by a 25-foot gold-plated umbilical line and propelled himself using a handheld oxygen-jet gun. Below him, Earth turned slowly. Above him, nothing. The spacewalk lasted 23 minutes and White described it as the most comfortable and most natural experience of his life.

Mission Control had to call him back inside three times. "I'm coming back in," he finally said. "And it's the saddest moment of my life." His colleague James McDivitt photographed him against the blue-white curve of the Earth, the Pacific stretching out below, in one of the most famous photographs in the history of space exploration. White wore a gold-plated visor to protect against the unfiltered rays of the sun. He had a maneuvering gun in his right hand and a look on his face that suggested he never wanted the tether to end.

Ed White died in the Apollo 1 fire on January 27, 1967, along with Gus Grissom and Roger Chaffee, during a launch rehearsal at Cape Kennedy. He was 36 years old. The image of him floating above the Earth remains one of the defining photographs of the 20th century.

Other notable June 3 events:

1924: The Gila National Wilderness in New Mexico was designated as the world's first official wilderness area, the visionary idea of Aldo Leopold who proposed that 558,000 acres of the Mogollon Mountains be protected from all development, 40 years before Congress gained the power of the Wilderness Act.

1964: Jimmy Nicol, a British session drummer, got to be a Beatle for 13 days when Ringo Starr collapsed with tonsillitis the night before a world tour. He performed at eight concerts alongside John, Paul, and George, going from relative obscurity to worldwide fame and back again in a fortnight.

1977: Bob Marley released Exodus, later named Album of the Century by TIME Magazine, a record that remains one of the most influential in history and whose songs of freedom and dignity have never stopped finding new listeners.

1992: Australia's High Court resolved Mabo v Queensland, the landmark case brought by Torres Strait Islander Eddie Mabo that overturned the principle of terra nullius and recognized pre-colonial land interests of Indigenous Australians for the first time in law.

— Mary Oliver

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:

🧫 Growing Human Tissue: Scientists can now grow functioning miniature replicas of human hearts, kidneys, lungs, and brains in laboratory dishes, transforming drug testing, disease research, and our understanding of human development in ways that will reshape medicine for generations.

🐆 Big Cats Recovering: Targeted conservation programs for cheetahs, snow leopards, and pumas have reversed population declines in several key habitats, with camera trap data showing successful breeding rather than just aging survivors, suggesting wild populations are beginning to stabilize.

🌱 Soil Science Revolution: A single teaspoon of healthy soil contains more living organisms than there are people on earth, and new precision farming tools can now measure and rebuild soil health in ways that increase yields, reduce chemical inputs, and lock carbon underground simultaneously.

🔬 Printing Human Tissue: Scientists have developed 3D bioprinting techniques that can print living human tissue including skin, cartilage, and early-stage organ scaffolds, with burn treatment applications already entering clinical trials and full organ printing targeted within the next decade.

🌺 Eradicating Ancient Diseases: Guinea worm disease infected 3.5 million people a year in 1986 and is now down to fewer than 15 cases globally, making it the first parasitic disease in history on the verge of eradication, achieved entirely without a vaccine through community education and water filtration alone.

Spread a little good news, and good things come back your way.

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