Goodable

Talk about an unexpected houseguest!

Staff at the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore got the surprise of the season when Kipepeo, a four-year-old giraffe who wasn’t known to be pregnant, casually gave birth to a healthy baby girl. The calf made her grand entrance in the early hours of March 27, and zookeepers are still doing double takes.

“Kipi,” as she’s affectionately called, had only arrived at the zoo in November. So when keepers noticed a tiny shift in her behavior on March 26, they thought she might be having an off day—not a whole baby.

But sure enough, by the next morning, Baltimore had a brand-new resident: a 128-pound, six-foot-tall bundle of spotted joy.

Erin Cantwell Grimm, the zoo’s Mammal Curator, explained that giraffe pregnancies last around 15 months. The baby—who hasn’t been named yet—is nursing like a champ and adjusting well to zoo life, while first-time mom Kipi is absolutely crushing it in the parenting department.

We’re just hoping she gave the zookeepers a high-five. Or, at the very least, a very tall head nod.

Disney’s Animal Kingdom welcomed its newest addition, a young Masai giraffe named Tucker, to the Kilimanjaro Safaris’ savannah.
Its mother, Mara, gave birth to the calf earlier this year and park visitors got the chance to see Tucker make his debut on Monday.
The new arrival is the first giraffe born at Walt Disney World Resort since 2021. In an announcement celebrating this new family member, the resort promised its ongoing commitment to wildlife and species protection.

Surprise! This Giraffe Just Unexpectedly Delivered an Adorable Baby

YR - Yr Vaughan

Health Canada is teaming up with Movember Canada to build the country’s first national strategy focused on the health of men and boys — a move officials say could save lives and unlock $12.4 billion in annual economic benefits.

A new study from Movember, The Real Face of Men’s Health, paints a stark picture: men in Canada are three times more likely to die by suicide than women. Health Canada says that improving men’s health could dramatically reduce healthcare costs and boost productivity.

On Feb. 23, the federal government launched a nationwide survey to help shape the upcoming strategy, which is expected later this year.

The data behind the effort underscores why policymakers are moving quickly. According to the Movember report, 28 percent of men meet the criteria for a substance use disorder at some point in their lives. Males account for 72 percent of all apparent opioid-related toxicity deaths from July 2024 to June 2025. Men are also three times more likely than women to develop a gambling addiction.

Health Canada says social factors are compounding the problem. Harmful online spaces — including corners of the so-called “manosphere” — along with rising isolation, are increasing health risks for boys and men. In 2021, men were twice as likely to die from preventable causes as women. And even when symptoms develop, many delay seeking help: 65 percent of men wait more than six days before seeing a doctor.

Health Minister Marjorie Michel says the strategy is meant to open a national conversation. “To build Canada Strong, we need the full participation of everyone in our society. Help us build a strategy that improves health, prevents harm, and strengthens our communities — for men, boys, and for everyone in Canada,” she said.

Movember’s global CEO Michelle Terry calls the partnership a “landmark moment.” For decades, she says, the group has witnessed how preventable illness, poor mental health and ineffective services ripple out into families and communities. A national strategy, she argues, allows Canada to move from “isolated projects to a co-ordinated, evidence-based approach that reaches men effectively and drives real outcomes.”

The federal plan will draw on input from provinces and territories, Indigenous partners, community groups, and stakeholders across the public and private sectors. Its goals include creating safer, more supportive environments, challenging harmful stereotypes, reducing stigma and encouraging men and boys to seek help early.

Canadians who want to take part can visit Canada.ca/Healthy-Men. Starting March 2, the public can submit feedback through an online form. Health Canada says it wants to hear from men, boys, partners, families, friends, community organizations and elected officials.

The message is clear: improving men’s health isn’t just a healthcare issue — it’s a national project with human and economic stakes, and one the government hopes Canadians will help shape.

Canada Launches First National Men’s Health Strategy With Movember, Citing $12.4B in Potential Savings

BBC News

Curtis Peters remembers the moment he’d had enough. Outside his family’s furniture shop, TS Domestics, litter kept piling up, and no matter how often it was cleared, more seemed to appear. “I think it all starts with pride,” he told BBC News. “If people have no pride in the area or pride where they live, then they're just gonna throw stuff everywhere.”

So he and his family didn’t wait for someone else to fix it. They launched the “Make Tunstall Great Again” campaign and started picking up rubbish themselves. Sixteen months later, they’ve carried out hundreds of litter picks, building a community effort one bag of trash at a time.

Social media helped spread the word. “We were just tired of seeing how the streets were,” Peters says. “We’ve just got a mission to make it better… so we'll just go and do it.”

Tunstall, the northernmost of Stoke-on-Trent’s six towns, has watched the effort ripple outward. TS Domestics team members Callum Wiggins and Lewis Martin say they’ve now spotted plenty of residents doing their own litter picks, inspired by the group’s example. Volunteer Rhys Oakes says the message is simple: “We’re spreading a message of, like, loving your community you know.”

Their work has grown enough to spark partnerships beyond Tunstall. The campaign recently teamed up with the Newcastle-under-Lyme Business Improvement District, which had been watching their progress online. “They’ve got a really good following and… a really young following as well that are really engaged,” says BID manager Charlotte Pearce. “They’re the kind of people that we really want to be targeting in the town centre.”

Meanwhile, the city has been trying to tackle the problem from the top down. Stoke-on-Trent City Council says it has spent £260,000 on fly-tipping enforcement since June 2023. In that period, the council recorded 16,726 reports of littering and fly-tipping, cleaned 20,347 incidents, and issued 5,330 fines. The total amount dumped was equivalent to filling 8,600 skips. Councillor Amjid Wazir says the council has added four street cleaning posts and now clears waste within three working days of a report.

The council has also tightened its collaboration with Peters’ team. “Following a meeting with TS Domestics last year, we have strengthened our working relationship,” Wazir says. TS Domestics now has direct contact with the council’s environmental team to arrange quick collections after each event. “They do excellent work in our communities and we are keen to support them wherever we can.”

Next, the group is taking its mission into schools, hoping to spark a long-term cultural shift. For Peters and his volunteers, instilling pride early is the key. If you want clean streets, they say, start with people who believe their area deserves better.

These Volunteers Were Tired of the Trash Piling Up, So They Started a Clean-Up Movement

If you wander into a church hall in North Hampshire on a Saturday morning, you might hear the whirr of a sewing machine, the click of a screwdriver or the soft cheer of someone watching a once-broken lamp flicker back to life. It’s all part of the North Hampshire Repair Café, a volunteer-run project that has quietly saved 2,670 kilograms of waste from landfill in just four years — roughly the weight of a Range Rover.

The café is part of a global movement of more than 2,500 similar groups, all built on the same idea: fix what you have instead of throwing it away. Here, the service is free, donations are optional, and the doors are open to anyone with something old, damaged, or sentimental they’d like to keep going.

For lead organiser Derek Prior, the project’s impact has been profound. He calls it one of his “proudest achievements,” and it’s easy to see why. Each month, villages including Hartley Wintney and Rotherwick host a four-hour session staffed by more than 30 volunteers. Some repair electronics, sharpen knives, stitch up clothing, or restore soft toys. Others greet visitors, manage the website, or hand out chocolate biscuits to keep the mood light.

And sometimes the work goes far beyond a simple fix.

Annette Cotterill arrived with a terrarium given to her as a wedding present 50 years ago by her late husband. The glass had cracked, and no professional shop would take it. A volunteer used a lead line to repair it, restoring it to its original form. “It’s like bringing a memory of my husband back,” she said. “I’ve been trying for years to get it repaired… so it’s lovely.”

The café isn’t just about mending objects. It’s about shifting habits.

Gill Harden brought her grandchildren along during half-term, hoping to spark a conversation about sustainability. “I’m hoping to teach them that you just don’t throw things away, and to value things really,” she said. “If it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t work out, but you try.”

Those small choices add up. Research for BBC Bin Day showed that Hart District Council collected nearly 35,000 tonnes of waste in 2023/24, roughly 343 kilograms per person. Every lamp rewired, teddy restitched, or toaster revived at the café cuts into that total.

The volunteers feel that impact every time someone walks out smiling. “Everybody that comes to the repair café knows it's wrong to throw things away,” Prior said. “We’re all just volunteers, giving up our time, and the best thing of all is seeing the smile on the customer's face when they walk out the door.”

A few biscuits, a few hours, a few spare parts — and a mountain of waste kept out of the ground. Sometimes repair really is the sweetest kind of recycling.

How a Village Repair Café Saved the Weight of a Range Rover From Landfill

The National Climate

Ayaan Mendon isn’t spending his preteen years the way most kids do. The 11-year-old mountaineer from Dubai is preparing to take on Mount Lenin, a 7,134-metre peak in Kyrgyzstan, as part of his long term goal to climb some of the tallest mountains on Earth.

For him, the appeal is simple. “It’s really challenging, the views are nice and it makes me stronger,” he told The National during a break from endurance training. “What I love most about climbing is that feeling of accomplishing something, going through an adventure that was so hard, that is very rare to do in your life… just remembering that you don't give up.”

Ayaan began mountaineering at seven and quickly built a résumé that seasoned climbers would admire. By eight, he had already climbed Mount Kilimanjaro at 5,895 metres, Mount Kosciuszko in Australia at 2,228 metres and Mount Elbrus in Europe at 5,642 metres. Mount Lenin will be his first attempt above 7,000 metres — and a key step before the peaks he’s truly after.

“My dream is to climb Mount Everest before I’m 18,” he said.

He understands the difficulty. Thin air near the summit, unpredictable weather and the sheer physical demand test even experienced climbers. A failed attempt on Mount Aconcagua in Argentina last year drove that home. Climbers were forced to turn back at 6,000 metres due to high winds. Aconcagua, at 6,962 metres, remains on his list.

Ayaan’s interest began after hearing about his father’s Kilimanjaro expedition in 2019. Since then, the family has taken on the challenge together. His parents climb with him when possible, using the years before age restrictions kick in to build the skills he’ll need at higher altitudes.

“It’s a good time to get Ayaan stronger for the bigger mountains, and we will climb with him,” said his father, Saboor Ahmad. That training covers everything from rope skills to moving in heavy boots to learning crampon technique on ice. More importantly, it teaches him how to read his own body. “If something is not right, he needs to be able to understand and speak up so we can take the right measures.”

Expeditions have become a family ritual — tents instead of screens, shared meals instead of emails. “We are away from electronics, really connecting with each other, enjoying nature and challenging ourselves,” Saboor said. His wife, Vani Mendon, joins every climb despite being afraid of heights. “I want to be there with Ayaan… I don’t summit any more because heights scare me, but Saboor goes with him all the way to the summit to make sure Ayaan is perfectly fine.”

Preparation is year round. There are long weighted walks, endurance sessions, strength workouts and nights spent acclimatising in an oxygen tent. His coach, Kenyan trainer Ceejay Bollo, blends physical and mental conditioning. “We go case by case and mountain by mountain,” he said. “Your body could be strong, but if your mentality is not strong enough then the mountain will definitely conquer you.”

Balance, coordination, core strength and stability work dominate the routine. “Sometimes we are running for a whole hour, other days we’re lifting heavy weights, like dead lifts, doing pull-ups,” Bollo said.

Despite the intensity, Ayaan still finds moments to be a kid. At rest stops on snowy slopes, he pulls out a yo-yo — his second favourite hobby — tossing it into the air and looping it around his ears as climbers cheer him on. “I really want to win the world yo-yo contest,” he said. “It requires some serious skill.”

For now, Mount Lenin is the next big test. Everest can wait. But not for long, if Ayaan has his way.

Why This Young Climber Vows To Never Give Up On Scaling The World's Highest Peaks

People

A California zoo welcomed an adorable arrival earlier this year.

Footage taken by the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance shows a newly hatched wattled jacana chick at the San Diego Zoo in January.

“Chick out this new arrival,” the zoo wrote on X. “A wattled jacana chick recently hatched at the San Diego Zoo. With long toes perfect for walking on lily pads and a devoted dad keeping a watchful eye, this tiny adventurer is ready to explore.”

Native to South America, the wattled jacana species has an unusual family structure where a large female has a harem of males she provides eggs for, according to the zoo. The matriarch even defends the males from other females while they incubate her eggs.

📸 San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance via Storyful

San Diego Zoo Welcomes Adorable Long-Legged Jacana Hatchling

GoodGoodGood

More than a decade after developing the first dissolvable pacemaker, Northwestern University professor Igor Efimov and his team have taken the idea to an entirely new scale. They’ve created what they describe as the world’s tiniest known pacemaker, a device small enough to inject and delicate enough for the newborns it’s meant to help.

“We were motivated by an unmet need: children born with congenital heart defects,” Efimov told IEEE Spectrum.

The new device is smaller than a grain of rice, slips into the body through a minimally invasive injection, and disappears once it’s no longer needed. For the babies it’s designed for, that simplicity solves a long standing problem.

“About 1% of children are born with congenital heart defects,” Efimov said in a statement for Northwestern University. “The good news is that these children only need temporary pacing after a surgery. In about seven days or so, most patients’ hearts will self-repair. But those seven days are absolutely critical.”

Traditional temporary pacemakers get the job done, but they rely on external wires threaded through the chest, and removing those wires can be risky. Efimov put it plainly. “Wires literally protrude from the body, attached to a pacemaker outside the body. When the pacemaker is no longer needed, a physician pulls it out. The wires can become enveloped in scar tissue. So, when the wires are pulled out, that can potentially damage the heart muscle.”

It’s not a hypothetical danger. “That’s actually how Neil Armstrong died. He had a temporary pacemaker after a bypass surgery. When the wires were removed, he experienced internal bleeding,” Efimov said.

The team’s dissolvable design removes that risk entirely. Once the heart recovers, the pacemaker breaks down naturally inside the body. No surgery, no wire removal, no scarring.

And the engineering doesn’t end there. Efimov’s group paired the tiny pacemaker with a small, flexible chest patch. It rests on the skin, senses irregular heart rhythms, and responds automatically. When something is off, the patch sends near infrared light to wirelessly activate the implanted device and bring the heartbeat back to where it should be.

Tests showed the system worked across a wide range of models. The dissolvable pacemaker performed well in small animals, large animals, and even donor hearts. Despite its size, it provided stimulation comparable to today’s full size devices.

Efimov and his team see this as more than a breakthrough for pediatric care. They believe the underlying approach could reshape other implanted devices too, especially temporary ones that currently require removal procedures.

Their goal is simple: build technology as gentle as the patients who rely on it.

Scientists Build a Pacemaker So Small It’s Like Injecting a Grain of Rice

Good News Network

In a dramatic turn of events at Chicago's Belmont Harbor, two quick-thinking individuals saved an infant from Lake Michigan after the wind swept a stroller off the dock. Lio Cundiff, 30, was on a phone call when he heard a woman's scream that left no room for doubt about what had just happened. The strong gusts had caught the bassinet, sending it tumbling into the water.

Cundiff immediately sprang into action. "I just realized that the lady wasn’t able to help because she was in too much panic, which is understandable. So I’m like, ‘I guess I’m going in,’ and I just jumped," he recounted to the Chicago Tribune. Without any plan but driven by instinct, he dove in after the sinking stroller.

When Cundiff reached the stroller, he struggled to free the baby as it started to sink further. Enter Luis Kapost, an American Airlines pilot who arrived just in time with a more composed approach. Recognizing Cundiff's predicament—treading water while holding onto 14 kilograms of wet stroller—Kapost threw him one sleeve of his Chicago Cubs jacket for support. "It helped a lot," Cundiff admitted.

Holding on to his end of the jacket, Kapost kept Cundiff afloat until they managed to retrieve the stroller with help from the baby's nanny who had hurried over. First responders soon arrived and transported both Cundiff and the infant to a nearby hospital for evaluation.

Despite fair weather conditions, Lake Michigan’s water remained cold enough to concern doctors at the hospital. They discovered elevated heart enzymes in Cundiff and recommended he stay overnight for observation.

Kapost didn't hold back praise for his fellow rescuer either: "That’s the epitome of a hero, someone who’s going to act, to help somebody else they don’t know even though they’re placing their own life in danger," he told the Tribune. "He’s an absolute rock star."

Cundiff later shared that being labeled as a hero felt strange; he saw himself merely as a server and stand-up comedian who was simply at Belmont Harbor at the right moment.

The incident underscores how crucial quick thinking and teamwork can be during unexpected emergencies.

When Wind Blew a Baby Stroller Into Lake Michigan — Two Strangers Jump Into Action And Save A Life

A New Jersey man has been reunited with his dog after a 43-day disappearance in the Colorado wilderness — a stretch of subzero nights, deep snow and near-impossible terrain that few animals survive.

Steven Maa was driving cross-country from New Jersey to California with his 10-year-old dog, Rocky, when they stopped in Montezuma, Colorado, on December 28. Maa planned to ski and arranged a pet sitter for a few hours. But minutes after the handoff, Rocky slipped out of his harness and ran straight into the mountains at roughly 3,000 metres above sea level.

Maa and his partner searched until 3 a.m. in a snowstorm before calling Summit Lost Pet Rescue, a Colorado nonprofit that specializes in finding missing pets. Volunteers quickly deployed trail cameras, scent stations and alerts to neighbours.

After three days, a front-door camera picked up Rocky alive. Then he vanished again — for 40 long days. Founder Brandon Ciullo told NJ.com that vehicles, predators and exposure are the biggest dangers in cases like this. As the weeks passed with no sightings, the team started preparing to scale back.

Everything changed on February 9, when a Ring camera captured a small black dog matching Rocky’s size and shape. Ciullo rushed to the scene. “This dog has been missing for 43 days, and I'm sure it is extremely starving and very, very close to dying,” he recalled.

Using Maa’s clothing, rescuers created a scent trail and set a humane trap. Rocky stepped in but didn’t trigger it. Ciullo reset it, added peanut butter and made a promise: “I’m not leaving this godd--- mountain until this dog is in the back of my truck.”

Hours later, Rocky was finally secured.

He was emaciated — dropping from about 23 kilograms to just 12 — but still full of energy. “We couldn't believe that this dog, that hasn't probably eaten in 43 days, had this much energy and this much life [in] him,” Ciullo said.

For Maa, the reunion on February 13 felt unreal. “Getting to see Rocky and seeing how happy he was to see me was definitely very emotional,” he said. “It was amazing.”

Rocky is now in California settling into his new home and, Maa added, acting like his old self again.

Against the odds, a dog lost in deep winter at 10,000 feet survived 43 days alone — and made it back to the person who never stopped looking.

Rescue Team Finds Missing Dog Alive After 43 Days in Colorado Wilderness

Scientific American

Mathematicians have chased the same question for more than 2,000 years: how many rational points — points whose coordinates are whole numbers or fractions — can lie on a given curve?

It’s an idea that captivated ancient Greek thinkers and has stayed stubbornly out of reach ever since. Curves look simple. They’re just the paths carved out by polynomial equations. But rational points behave in ways that are anything but simple. Some curves have none. Some have infinitely many. And many mathematical breakthroughs, including the foundations of modern cryptography, have come from trying to understand them better.

Now, three Chinese mathematicians have taken a step researchers have dreamed about for decades. In a preprint posted on February 2, they unveiled the first uniform formula that applies to every curve — no matter its shape, degree or quirks — and gives a hard upper limit on how many rational points it can have.

“This really is an amazing result that sets a new standard for what to expect,” said Hector Pasten of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, who was not involved in the work.

To appreciate the leap, it helps to see where mathematicians were stuck. For nearly a century, researchers knew that curves with sufficiently high degree — meaning the powers of x and y in their defining equations — could only have a finite number of rational points. That was Louis Mordell’s conjecture in 1922, finally proved in 1983 by Gerd Faltings, who went on to win the Fields Medal for it.

But Faltings’s theorem came with a catch: it didn’t say how many rational points might exist. The number could be three. It could be a hundred. Mathematicians believed a formula was out there somewhere, but it remained hidden.

The new proof doesn’t give an exact count, but it does set an explicit upper limit — and does so for all curves at once. “This one statement gives us a broad sweep of understanding,” said Barry Mazur of Harvard University.

The formula depends only on two ingredients. The first is the curve’s degree: the higher it is, the weaker the bound becomes. The second is something called the Jacobian variety, a geometric object tied to every curve that acts like a kind of mathematical fingerprint. Jacobians already play a central role in number theory, and the new result gives researchers a fresh way to probe them.

It’s a breakthrough with implications far beyond curves. Rational points are just the beginning. Once you move from curves to surfaces or even higher-dimensional shapes known as manifolds, the questions multiply. These structures sit at the heart of modern mathematics and theoretical physics, shaping ideas about space, time and symmetry.

Progress has been building. Pasten and mathematician Jerson Caro set upper bounds for certain surfaces last year. Other teams have recently delivered new results on rational points for special families of curves. The collective momentum has researchers buzzing.

“This is an exciting, fast-moving area,” Mazur said. “There’s something big happening right now.”

For a field that measures progress in decades or centuries, the arrival of a formula mathematicians once considered out of reach feels like a turning point — the start of a new chapter in one of math’s oldest sagas.

Mathematicians Just Solved a 2,000-Year-Old Mystery On Curves

USA Today

Juan Uribe didn’t join TikTok to post dance videos or jokes. He joined because he was running out of options.

“I'm posting this because I need your help to save my son,” he said in his very first video on Feb. 10. He apologized for being new to social media, but the message was clear. His 15-year-old son Max has a rare blood disorder that could soon develop into a deadly cancer if he doesn’t find a stem cell donor.

Finding that donor is complicated. Max is half-Colombian on his dad’s side and part Italian, British and German on his mom’s. That genetic mix makes matching harder, and minorities remain underrepresented in national registries. The NMDP, the nonprofit that manages what it calls the world’s most diverse stem cell registry, says donor match rates vary widely by ethnicity. Black and African American patients have just a 29% chance of finding a perfect match, compared with 48% for Hispanic patients and 79% for non-Hispanic white patients.

Max’s doctors had searched through 40 million registered donors and found only two potential matches. Neither worked out. Even his twin sister wasn’t a match.

So Uribe turned to the internet. He wondered whether influencers would help spread the word, but instead became one himself. His first post brought in 20.5 million views and 4.3 million likes. Celebrities including Joe Jonas and Meghan Trainor shared his plea. Soon “Team Max” had more than 100,000 followers.

Within 24 hours, 12,000 people had requested cheek-swab kits to join the registry, according to the NMDP. Although only 13% of its members identify as Hispanic, nearly 56% of the people signing up after Uribe’s post were Latino or Hispanic. That uptick amounts to a 40% increase, the organization told USA TODAY.

The surge gave the family hope, but the clock hasn’t stopped. “With my son's timeline, it's crunch time,” Uribe said. Doctors estimate Max has only weeks before his condition worsens. “We're in a little bit of a race against the clock, because of the progression.”

Max’s health problems began when he was six. His platelets and blood cell counts were far too low, though doctors ruled out leukemia. Years of testing followed. In late 2024, his counts dropped again. In August 2025, a bone marrow biopsy revealed what doctors called “pink flags” — signs that made one specialist tell the family, “You should add a transplant doctor to Max's care team.”

“That made us realize that this is super serious,” Uribe said. Doctors still don’t know what caused Max’s disorder, but they now agree that without treatment, it will become MDS, a group of blood cancers that can progress to acute myeloid leukemia. A transplant remains his only cure.

Uribe’s mission has grown far beyond his own home. Families across the country have reached out with their own stories — a 3-year-old in Utah with Cambodian and Norwegian heritage, a 22-year-old with Haitian and Irish roots, even another child in Max’s school community. Many face the same problem: ethnic background plays a major role in finding a match.

“This is more widespread than you think,” Uribe said. “There's lots of other patients that are searching and struggling and don't want to be public identified.”

That’s why he’s pushing hard to bring one million new people into the registry by April 1. He talks about Max like any proud father would — how he stands up for bullied kids, how he looks after his sister, how he splits his time between sports and composing his own piano music on Spotify.

Uribe knows that even if a match for Max doesn’t come in time, thousands of other lives could be changed by the wave of new donors. “Everyone should really get added to the registry as quick as possible,” he said. “It's the easiest way to save a life.”

For anyone interested in joining the registry, NMDP offers free, mail-in cheek swab kits at https://go.nmdp.org/formax.

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