Episode Description:

A high-risk breast cancer diagnosis used to mean one thing: chemotherapy. A large UK trial just found that 68 percent of those patients could skip it safely, based on a genomic test that already exists and is already in use.

Arielle and Karissa also get into the pigeon liver finding that stumped scientists for over a century, a California city that voted to permanently ban data centers, and France formally repealing a law that had been sitting on the books since 1685.

Stay tuned until the end for this week’s Emissary Shout Out!

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Theme and all original music by Marvin Lanes

Transcript:

Karissa: 

Hello everyone , I’m Karissa.

Arielle: 

And I’m Arielle.

Karissa: 

And welcome back to The Optimist Daily’s weekly roundup

Arielle: 

Yes, we are so happy to be here, feeling really positive today personally. How are you, Karissa?

Karissa: 

Yeah, I’m feeling pretty positive myself. The sun is shining, lots of good news to share.

Arielle: 

And we also have two Emissary shout-outs that came in.

Karissa: 

Yeah, keep the shout-outs coming, Emissaries. We wanna recognize what makes you optimistic, of course. And if you want a shout-out on the podcast and support The Optimist Daily financially, you can become an Emissary, and the link is in the show notes.

Arielle: 

Yes, we cannot do this work without you, so thank you so much to all the Emissaries out there. But also thanks to all the Optimists who are just part of our community who read our articles or listen to the podcast or both, follow us on socials. All of that support, rates, reviews, subscriptions, all of that really does keep us going, and yeah, we definitely need it. Uh, some days are not as positive as others, and knowing that we have such a great community around us helps us continue on.

Karissa: 

If you want These solutions in a different format, we have our daily and weekly edition of the newsletter that you can sign up for.

And again, link is in the show notes.

Arielle: 

And if you have any comments, questions, or feedback, you can reach us at podcast@optimistdaily.com.

Karissa: 

Yeah, or on any social media channels. We’re @optimistdaily on just about everything except on X, where we are @OdeToOptimism.

Arielle: 

Oh, I should mention that next week there is a very, very special guest interview, coming out.

Karissa: 

That’s right. I am looking forward to hearing this special guest episode.

Arielle: 

Yes. But for now, let’s focus on the solutions that were published this week on The Optimist Daily. Karissa, do you wanna jump in?

Karissa: 

Yeah!

The first solution we shared this week is called “Breast cancer genomic test could spare millions from chemotherapy.” A massive UK trial just found that 68% of high-risk breast cancer patients could safely skip chemotherapy based on a single genomic test. But the key word here is high risk. These are patients who, by every traditional measure, were supposed to need chemotherapy. Chemotherapy is just a very intensive and emotional process to go through,

Arielle: 

Mm-hmm.

Karissa: 

of course, physically tolling as well.

So the fact that this test could possibly change clinical treatment of breast cancer is very optimistic in my opinion.

Arielle: 

Yeah, it’s great to see the growing awareness around, long-term quality of life costs of cancer treatment and not just survival outcomes. This genomic test, uh, Prosig- Prosigna I think it’s called, already exists and is available. So this isn’t a future technology story.

It’s a clinical practice story that’s happening right now.

Karissa: 

In this trial, 68% of patients who were clinically flagged high risk scored low on the genomic test, and it meant that their outcomes were nearly identical to those who went through full chemotherapy. So that’s a pretty big number, and yeah, I mean, again, can just change the treatment of cancer if it’s just widely implemented more.

Arielle: 

I wonder if maybe this test can be applied to other cancers as well, maybe in the future.

Karissa: 

I’m sure it’s definitely in the works.

All right, I’m gonna move on to solution number two, which is “The parenting habit that builds lifelong closeness with adult children.”

The research is fairly consistent. Some parents stay genuinely close to their adult children, and some don’t, of course. But the gap isn’t really about love, because most parents love their children deeply.

In this solution, we get some insight from a Harvard-affiliated psychologist who has been studying what actually separates the two groups, and it comes down to one pattern that plays out in small moments across years. And the core finding was that unconditional parental regard: love, and acceptance that doesn’t depend on the child meeting expectations, is the defining factor in whether adult children stay genuinely close to their parents.

Arielle: 

Yeah, parent-child relationships are often very complex and, this article goes into what, um, conditional parental regard looks like. So basically, if a child calls their parent and says something like, “Oh, I lost my job,” or, you know, “I’m, I’m having a low moment right now,” and then the parent can’t really react to that in, um…

Yeah, they’re, they’re just disappointed, and there’s this overwhelming feeling of negativity, when their child comes to them with this type of news instead of, I guess a more supportive way of reacting to, um, news that is not necessarily the most positive.

Karissa: 

Yeah, and Everyone’s gonna make mistakes; nobody is perfect. But I think the baseline here is just to be supportive and be there for your kids. 

Arielle: 

Yeah.

Karissa: 

I also thought this solution made a good point that a lot of parenting advice is aimed at parents with younger children or teenage children, but, you know, you’re always gonna be a parent through your entire life,

parenting is a life journey. 

Arielle: 

Yeah, yeah. This might be personal, Karissa, but how’s your relationship with your, with your parents?

Karissa: 

I have a pretty great relationship with my parents, but it’s been complex and it gets even more complex being an adult and dealing with boundaries and stuff. of, you know, I am no longer a kid, I am an adult now who can make my own decisions. But for the most part, it’s, it’s good, but complex.

Arielle: 

Yeah. Um, similar. My relationship with my parents was definitely more fraught with disagreements and, um, maybe not the best communication styles on both, on both sides. But what I love is that they have actually apologized to me about things that they now know they could have done better, and that is really healing.

Um, and I think it definitely helps me stay close to them ’cause, yeah, it’s so remarkable when a parent, a person of authority, can admit when they’re wrong and, um, yeah, for it not to be, like, something that they’ll never do or something that you can never hope for as a child. Um, so yeah, I would say it’s good.

Karissa: 

Yeah, exactly. I think I’m still waiting For a couple apologies. But one day. We’re all evolving.

I’m gonna move on to another solution that we shared this week, and it is called “France finally votes to strike the Code Noir from books, its last slavery law.” Believe it or not, there was still an untouched, unrepealed slavery law for the past 170 years still existing, even though slavery was abolished in France. So France’s National Assembly just voted 254 to zero to formally repeal the Code Noir, and it was the 1685 royal decree from Louis XIV that governed enslaved people in French colonies. I would like to say that it’s opening up this conversation of, I mean, for one, why was it still there?

What can France do to give proper acknowledgement and reparations to what they have done throughout history.

Arielle: 

Mm-hmm. One of the shocking things is that, after Haiti won independence in 1804, the country was forced to pay France reparations for the loss of enslaved labor, which, yeah, that’s, that’s absolutely bonkers to me. And, and they took high interest loans, and they only cleared the debt in 1952, so yeah, it feels like there needs to be a lot more done to address this horrible history. 

Karissa: 

The entire world is grappling with the long-term lasting effects of slavery across the world, and colonization.

So yeah, goodbye 1685 law.

We have another lifestyle solution this week, and it’s “five habits that separate growing teams from stagnant ones.”

Knowledge workers lose 60% of their working time to what researchers call work about work, and that’s status updates, unfocused meetings, tool switching that produces nothing.

But a chief people officer at a major firm says the gap between teams that keep growing and teams that just plateau isn’t talent. It’s daily habits, and habits, unlike talent, are entirely within your control. So this article gave some good insight into, yeah, just how to keep growing a team. The advice comes from Julie Turpin, who is the chief people officer at Brown and Brown, and she says results that stick are built by habits that stick over time. The most Interesting habit to me, was to question inherited habits that happen on a team.

Because, you know, most professional habits were never consciously chosen, and it’s just like, “We’ve been doing this the whole time,” or, “Ever since I’ve been here.”

Arielle: 

Mm-hmm.

Karissa: 

It’s important to challenge, you know, meeting formats that don’t really have a purpose or, you know, often get off topic, and decision processes and, you know, just the kinda habits that maybe you don’t need.

Arielle: 

Yeah, or maybe even challenging meeting formats that you might not know are kind of dragging the team down because, yeah, you just haven’t tried it in another way or just haven’t questioned it. 

Karissa: 

Yeah, exactly. There’s four other Habits in here that Julie shares, so check them out if you are a team leader or part of a team.

 The last solution that I have to share today is that “Monterey Park became the first US city to permanently ban data centers.”

Monterey Park is in California, and it just became the first city in the US to permanently ban data centers with 86% of the vote this recent election. The ballot resolution here cited noise pollution, air pollution, and spikes in electricity and water rates as the driving reasons of why.

This serves as a good model for other US cities because data centers are rising up everywhere with the rise of AI, and they have pretty negative effects.

As Mayor Elizabeth Yang told Politico, “A lot of other cities that are facing data center proposals are going to follow suit,” pointing to data center protests already happening nationwide.

Arielle: 

And as you said, data centers do have a pretty negative impact, not just environmentally, but also for the residents near them because

Karissa: 

Mm-hmm.

Arielle: 

residents have documented real impacts on utility bills for one, which are already expensive enough, let’s not spike them any higher, and their quality of life.

As you said, noise pollution is one of the issues, and I think we wrote a piece a long time ago, about how noise pollution actually can shave off two years of your life.

Karissa: 

Yeah, exactly. But for now, this serves as just a great model that, this can be, you know, a community voted on issue, and other cities and areas may follow a similar process and put this on their ballots.

Arielle: 

I will continue with the sixth solution, which is titled: “How the act of learning to read rewires the brain and changes the way you hear.” Adults who learn to read and adults who never did can both understand their native languages perfectly.

But if you put them in front of an unfamiliar language, something very different happens, and the gap has nothing to do with intelligence. It’s about what reading instruction does to the brain at the structural level. So this study was published in Cortex, and it was led by cognitive neuroscientist Mariana P. Nucci at the University of São Paulo. They tested three groups: 23 young educated adults, 21 older educated adults, and 15 functionally illiterate older adults, all native Portuguese speakers. They had two listening tasks. They listened to Portuguese, which is their native language, and Japanese, which is completely unfamiliar. In the Portuguese task, all three groups performed similarly, around 90% accuracy, so no meaningful difference between groups. But the Japanese task revealed a stark split.

Functionally illiterate participants scored 17% accuracy, older educated adults 48%, and young educated adults 75%. So the brain imaging showed educated participants activated the right inferior frontal gyrus during the Japanese task. That’s the right hemisphere counterpart to Broca’s area associated with language processing.

And functionally illiterate participants showed no activation in this region at all. I think this is really fascinating. Basically, it’s just a great motivation to make sure that your kids are learning to read well. Um, there’s also a debate over how to teach reading, if it’s, you know, phonetics versus whole language, and that has also been politic-politically charged in recent years.

So this research is structural evidence for what phonics instruction is actually building in the brain.

Karissa: 

Yeah, exactly. This is just such a fascinating study here and fascinating finding

Arielle: 

Yeah, I kind of went into detail there, but this was… Yeah, I couldn’t stop reading about it, so I highly recommend checking it out.

All right. The next solution is called “Five plant health boosting orange peel tricks to use in your garden this summer.” Before you toss that orange peel, you should know it can go into your compost, repel the ants around your plants, and scrub the bacteria off your gardening tools.

Gardening experts break down what actually works and where to maybe stop. So I learned a lot about orange peels reading this article. Orange peels contain limonene, citric acids, flavonoids, polyphenols, and antimicrobial compounds. The article goes into depth about all of the uses that orange peels offer to your garden.

One that I didn’t know was how it keeps cats out.

Karissa: 

Yeah

Arielle: 

if y- maybe you knew this, Karissa, because you have cats.

Karissa: 

I don’t think I knew that because, and I mean, my cat is an indoor-only cat, but I wonder if that applies to houseplants as well, because she does like to put her little paws in the houseplant soil.

Arielle: 

Hmm.

I don’t have a garden myself. I just have the balcony, which I think I’ve mentioned a couple times on the podcast before. But as soon as I do have that yard and do have that garden, I’m gonna be referencing this article.

The next solution is called “WasteBar turns cigarette butt waste into food currency in the Netherlands.”

Karissa: 

This was my favorite solution

Arielle: 

So this is kind of,

Karissa: 

from the week.

Arielle: 

Yeah, it’s local to me as well, so maybe I’ll check it out. In the Netherlands where I live, there’s a mobile cart that will give you Dutch mini pancakes if you bring it cigarette butts.

And yeah, that’s it. That’s the whole concept, and it turns out that that’s enough.

WasteBar is a mobile cart that exchanges litter, mainly cigarette butts and cans, for food and drinks, including poffertjes, which are Dutch mini pancakes, and they are delicious.

The Netherlands discards between five and 10 billion cigarette butts a year. Each filter is a plastic that takes up to a decade to break down, leaching nicotine and heavy metals into soil and waterways. So this is a great and fun solution that’s having real impact today.

Karissa: 

People just need A little incentive to, um, help clean up and I think pancakes would definitely incentivize me to want

Arielle: 

Mm-hmm.

Karissa: 

pick up. So I think this is pretty cool, and I think similar models, of course, could be developed anywhere in the world.

Arielle: 

I think that the logic behind it is particularly compelling ’cause the barrier to cleanup usually isn’t values. I mean, most people aren’t pro-litter, but it feels like picking up a few things in your neighborhood, that could feel a bit pointless.

Karissa: 

Mm-hmm.

Arielle: 

So a tangible reward changes that calculation.

So yeah, this could definitely be a broader movement in all of Europe or also in North America, um, anywhere, as you said, Karissa.

The ninth solution is called “Dinner scraps are rebuilding California’s lost oyster reefs.” 85% of Earth’s oyster reefs are gone. A marine scientist in California is rebuilding them using shells scraped off restaurant plates, 24,000 pounds collected so far and counting. The part that surprised me the most is what happens to the shells before they ever touch the ocean again, I guess, ’cause they came from the ocean.

Karissa: 

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Arielle: 

Um, so after collection from the restaurants, shells are spread under the Californian sun for at least six months. That’s a long time to be, like, tanning. This curing process removes harmful pathogens before the shells are redeployed in the ocean.

Karissa: 

Yeah, that’s pretty fascinating.

Arielle: 

I guess that’s what it takes to, um, to remove all those pathogens

Karissa: 

Yeah, exactly.

Arielle: 

Oyster reefs are really important functioning habitats. A single oyster can filter up to 50 gallons of water per day under the right conditions, and cleaner water supports underwater grass growth, which shelters juvenile crabs and scallops and fish.

Karissa: 

Yeah, exactly. Restaurant leftovers becoming coastal infrastructure is just very compelling.

Arielle: 

Mm-hmm.

Karissa: 

to me. I don’t eat oysters, but I’ve definitely been with people who do, and just I’ve never thought about what happens to the shells, and the fact that they can be repurposed for something so important is amazing.

Arielle: 

So the last solution of the week is called “How pigeons find their way home. the answer is a magnetic compass in the liver.”

Scientists have been trying to locate the magnetic compass inside homing pigeons for over a century. They looked in the beak, they looked in the eyes, they looked in the brain.

But a new study in Science just found it in the liver, and the way they confirmed it is one of the more elegant pieces of experimental biology you’ll hear about this year.

I’m not going to go too deeply into the science of it because it’s just– it’s, it’s so much.

It’s,

Karissa: 

Yeah

Arielle: 

maybe a bit too complicated for me to explain. but I do love that animal cognition and navigation keep coming up, and they keep producing counterintuitive results. This belongs to a broader cultural moment of reconsidering what other species are doing that we as humans have missed.

‘Cause we just think we’re the smartest, uh, most intelligent creatures on this planet, but maybe we’re just missing the type of intelligence that other species have. I just think that this kind of research has a lot of conservation power behind it.

Karissa: 

Yeah, exactly. And I mean, just understanding our world, our fellow animals on the planet is

super important. 

Arielle: 

Well, that was all of our solutions this week, but we do have an Emissary shout-out. So Karissa, would you like to do the honors?

Karissa: 

Yes, of course. 

So shout out to Dori, one of our Optimist Daily Emissaries, and she said, “Whenever I need to be reminded that there is hope for the world, I look to my friend Susan Allen. Susan is an anthropologist who has worked in nonviolence education for decades, and has not only written a book, which is called ‘Media Anthropology: Informing Global Citizens,’ but also co-chaired the Campaign for Nonviolence at Kansas State University from 2000 to 2015.” So a good run there. “Dr. Allen has recently re-released her easy-to-read and useful book titled ‘Everyday Nonviolence’ that has been used in classrooms and reading groups around the country. Her writing gives hope that there are peaceful ways to resolve conflict. I highly recommend that you all check it out at www.everydaynonviolence.com.”

Arielle: 

Amazing . I’m gonna link that into the show notes so that it’s easy to find for everyone who is interested.

Karissa: 

Sounds like a solution that we can definitely get behind at The Optimist Daily. So thank you, Dori, and thank you, Susan, for making the world a better place.

Arielle: 

And if you sent in an Emissary shout-out and we haven’t read it today, it’s because it’s coming not next week, but in two weeks. So don’t worry, we have not forgotten you. We just wanna make sure everyone has their time to shine, and we don’t wanna start, um, reading more than one shout-out every week.

Karissa: 

If you haven’t submitted your shout-out yet as an Emissary, the link is still there for you if you need it. If it got lost somewhere, just reach out to us and we can send it to you again.

And of course, we’ll leave you off with a positive quote to end the podcast today.

Arielle: 

This is from Celerie Kemble, and it’s very simple but very powerful. “There’s a reason we don’t see the world in black and white.”

Karissa: 

Yeah. It’s simple but powerful indeed, and we are lucky to see the world in color because there are a lot of things going on that make this world so colorful.

Arielle: And there’s no need to polarize situations and oversimplify them when they are complex, when there’s gray space, when there’s room for discussion and room for collaboration to come to, a more peaceful way of understanding each other. So that’s a great quote.

Karissa and I hope you have an amazing weekend, and we will be back next week with a guest interview.

Karissa: 

Yeah. Until then, everybody, stay optimistic!

Arielle: 

Bye!

Karissa: 

Bye!