Thursday, June 26th, 2025

Good Morning! 🌞

Sometimes, gratitude hits you like a lightning bolt.
Not the kind you plan for—like promotions or birthdays—but the surprise kind. A stranger holding the door when your hands are full. A phone call from an old friend when you needed it most. Or, in one wild true story we’re featuring today… a kid who literally saved someone’s life.

Today’s issue is all about those moments—unplanned, unexpected, unforgettable. The ones that remind us the world isn’t all noise and chaos. Sometimes, it’s quietly miraculous.

Let’s celebrate the good. You never know when it’ll show up.

Earth Sciences

‘Unseen’ Colors Captured

A stunning new image of the Sculptor Galaxy spans 65,000 light-years and was built from 100 exposures taken over 50 hours using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT). By capturing light in thousands of colors across the galaxy, astronomers created a detailed snapshot of star formation and galactic activity. “We can zoom in to study individual regions where stars form at nearly the scale of individual stars, but we can also zoom out to study the galaxy as a whole,” said co-author Kathryn Kreckel of Heidelberg University.

Sculptor lies 1.1 million light-years from Earth and contains around 500 nebulae—star-forming regions filled with gas and dust. Older methods typically detected only about 100 such nebulae. These regions emit light across a broad color spectrum, and by studying the wavelengths through spectroscopy, scientists can determine a star’s age, motion, and activity level. “Even after nearly a century of close study, galaxies remain incredibly complicated systems that we struggle to fully understand,” said researcher Enrico Congiu, who led the new Astronomy & Astrophysics study.

A second image from the research highlights how specific wavelengths from elements like hydrogen, nitrogen, sulfur, and oxygen appear in distinct colors. In the galaxy’s pink regions, gas glows from radiation emitted by newborn stars. A central cone of white light shows gas being ejected by Sculptor’s supermassive black hole. With the high-resolution spectrograph mounted on ESO’s Southern Hemisphere-based VLT, astronomers were able to examine the galaxy both in intricate detail and as a complete system—offering new insights into how galaxies evolve.

Good News

Four-year-old Saves Life

Four-year-old Kyndal Bradley knew how to call her mom—but emergency procedures like dialing 911 had never come up at home. So when a medical emergency unfolded at her Tennessee daycare, no one expected it would be Kyndal who took action. A teacher in the Clarksville classroom collapsed from a seizure and was the only adult present. As the other children froze, Kyndal ran for help. “I told the teacher,” she recalled. “I said the other teacher; she was sick.”

When paramedics arrived, they discovered the teacher had stopped breathing twice. She was rushed to the hospital and is now recovering, according to WSMV. Kyndal’s quick thinking didn’t go unnoticed. Daycare staff soon visited the home of her mother, Taylor Moore, to share what had happened. “They were like, ‘She’s our hero for the day,’ and I’m kind of looking like, what happened?” Moore said. “If she hadn’t have gone and got the assistance, this story could have gone a totally different way.”

The moment left Moore stunned—and proud. “I never thought to introduce what to do if an emergency arises, so it was a shock to me to see that she knew exactly what to do in a situation like that,” she said during a video call, with a beaming Kyndal in her arms.

Lifestyle

Ireland Shuts Last Coal Plant

Ireland is set to become the fifteenth European country to remove coal from its energy mix, marking a major milestone in the country’s shift toward renewables. The ESB Moneypoint power station in County Clare—the last facility capable of burning coal—will now be converted to burn emergency oil reserves. Built in the 1980s to reduce Ireland’s reliance on oil, Moneypoint will exit the wholesale electricity market this June, with all oil use scheduled to end by 2029.

Wind energy is now leading the charge. Ireland generated 11 terawatt-hours of electricity from wind last year, making up 37% of its total electricity supply, according to renewables think tank Ember. “Ireland has quietly rewritten its energy story, replacing toxic coal with homegrown renewable power,” said Alexandru Mustață, campaigner on coal and gas at Europe’s Beyond Fossil Fuels. Still, Mustață emphasized that the work isn’t finished: “The government’s priority now must be building a power system for a renewable future; one with the storage, flexibility, and grid infrastructure needed to run fully on clean, domestic renewable electricity.”

Ireland now joins countries like Belgium, Sweden, Austria, Portugal, and the UK in fully phasing out coal, with Spain and Slovakia expected to follow this year. Some countries—like Cyprus, Switzerland, and Norway—never used coal for grid power. Others, including Germany and Romania, have formal exit plans in place, while nations like Poland and Serbia have yet to commit. Ireland’s move signals continued momentum across Europe to transition away from coal and toward cleaner, more sustainable energy systems.

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Mind Stretchers

⁉️

I do not speak, yet stories I tell,
Of warriors, lovers, and oceans that swell.
I vanish by day, but at night I appear,
A million tiny lights, cold and clear.
What am I?

Yesterday’s Answers to the Mind Stretchers:

— knock on wood! Gerry Moore got this correct first! 🌞 

Be the first to send us the correct answer for today’s mind stretcher for a shout-out with the answer tomorrow. Just send us the answer and your name to[email protected]or reply to email.

If you have any uplifting stories and experience you might want to share, send those over to [email protected] for the chance to be featured.