Every Sunday, five stories from science, humanitarian progress, and human achievement. Because the world is not only what the rest of the week’s news suggests.
It has been a week. You know what kind. So here are five things that are also true about the world right now.
A newsletter called HEAR put out a piece this week that stopped me in my tracks. The premise is simple: grow food. Anywhere. A sprig of oregano on a windowsill. A tomato plant on a balcony. A sprouted garlic clove at the door of an RV. A community plot with some friends and some old plastic bins. The piece draws on the science of soil and mental health: putting your hands in dirt makes you genuinely, measurably happier. This is not a metaphor, it’s science. It also draws on the history of Victory Gardens during World War II, when 40 percent of American vegetables were grown in backyards and vacant lots, and points to Todmorden, a small English town that converted its empty public spaces into free community food gardens and inspired similar projects around the world. The argument is not complicated: growing something and sharing it with a neighbor reconnects you to the things that have always fed us. The earth has everything we need. We have largely forgotten this. We can remember it a tomato plant at a time.
Researchers at the University of Houston created a material that conducts electricity with zero resistance at 151 Kelvin (minus 122 degrees Celsius) under normal pressure conditions. The previous superconductivity record had stood for more than 30 years. Superconductivity is the holy grail of energy transmission: a world with practical superconductors would have power grids that waste nothing, trains that float on magnetic fields, medical equipment that costs a fraction of what it does today, and computers that are orders of magnitude faster. We are not there yet. But the record just moved significantly closer to the temperatures at which practical applications become possible, and it moved under normal pressure conditions, which is the part that has always made previous breakthroughs difficult to translate into the real world.
Jeff Asher, who compiles crime data ahead of the FBI’s official annual report, found that the US homicide rate fell sharply in 2025, continuing a decline that began in 2023. About 14,000 people were murdered in the US last year. Asher calls that “still far too many.” It is. And it represents tremendous progress from recent peaks. This does not mean the work is done. It means the work is working somewhere, for someone, and that is worth knowing.
A rewilding site in England recorded a 900 percent increase in breeding bird populations over two decades. Rewilding, the practice of removing intensive land management and allowing natural processes to restore an ecosystem, has been controversial in farming communities and celebrated by conservationists. The data from this site is the kind of thing that ends arguments: when you stop managing land for maximum extraction and let it return to something resembling itself, life comes back. Species that had disappeared come back. Birds nest. Things that were gone return.
On May 31, 1926, Kruger National Park was established in northeastern South Africa. One hundred years later, it is one of the largest game reserves on the continent, more than twice the size of Yellowstone, at 7,576 square miles. It is part of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, crossing into Mozambique and Zimbabwe to form a protected area bigger than Belgium, where lions, leopards, elephants, rhinos, and buffalo move across borders with no interest in human geopolitics. A century ago, someone decided this land was worth protecting. A hundred years of that decision is worth marking today.
Go outside if you can. The earth is still out there..
Sources: HEAR Newsletter, "Grow a Love Garden" (May 27); ScienceDaily/University of Houston (superconductivity record, May 27); Positive News (US murder rate decline, rewilding bird increase, May 2026); Good News Network (Kruger National Park centennial, May 31)
“Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government.” — Thomas Jefferson, 1789
