Episode Description:

Most world maps show Greenland and Africa as roughly the same size… which is kind of unbelievable considering Africa is 14 times larger! This error has been built into classrooms, boardrooms, and institutions since 1569. Last week, 164 countries finally voted to fix it.

Arielle and Karissa also cover a solar ambulance built by university students that completed its first real-world test in rural Kenya, a student baking operation in Frisco, Texas that has raised over $8,000 for food-insecure kids, and why the best time to deal with weeds is probably right now.

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Theme and all original music by Marvin Lanes

Transcript:

Intro & Housekeeping

Arielle: 

Hi, everyone. It’s Arielle.

Karissa: 

And I’m Karissa.

Arielle: 

And welcome back to The Optimist Daily’s Weekly Roundup. How are you doing this- uh, this beautiful Friday, Karissa?

Karissa: 

Doing great. It’s, it’s a beautiful Friday indeed. What about you, Arielle?

Arielle: 

I’m doing well. I am excited for hopefully a less social weekend. I think as the summer winds down-

Karissa: 

Mm-hmm

Arielle: 

people are a little bit more introspective, and I’m gonna try to, um, to save my, my own energy and keep a little bit to myself-

Karissa: 

Mm-hmm …

Arielle: 

and do cozy things like crochet or watch a movie or curl up with a book or something like that. 

Karissa: 

Yeah. That’s exactly how I feel. I think finally I’m past so many of the summer weekends now that everyone’s kind of settling in this back to school, back to everything routine that- Mm-hmm

comes with September, I feel like. So I think this is my first free-ish weekend in a while myself, and I really need to start… I’m, I’m very determined to, uh, sew everybody something for Christmas presents this year, but I have to get started now, otherwise it’s gonna not happen. So I’m hoping this weekend I can sit down and get to work on that.

Arielle: 

Oh, wow. Yeah, you did mention that you started sewing. Is that a new hobby, or? 

Karissa: 

Yeah. That’s a recent hobby for me, which is such a coincidence because we actually have a solution that we’ll share at the end about how great hobbies are for you. 

Arielle: 

Hmm. All right. Well, before we jump into the solutions, just a quick reminder, nominations are still open for our Local Changemaker series, which we do every year in the run-up to Thanksgiving.

Karissa: 

And if you missed the update last week, we’re doing the whole Changemaker series this year on Changemakers 30 and under. 

Arielle: 

If you know someone, a young person making a positive impact in their community, nominate them. It’s a great way to practice your gratitude. The link to do that- Mm-hmm … is in the show notes, and it only takes two minutes.

Karissa: 

And everyone who submits a nomination gets entered to win an Optimist Daily mug. 

Arielle: 

It’s honestly my favorite mug. It’s such a good mug. Mm-hmm. And we have decided on a closing date, so that’ll be Friday, October 2nd. So you still have a couple weeks to get your nominations in, but we’re excited to see who you guys introduce us to.

Karissa: 

Absolutely. And just a reminder that we have a free daily and weekly newsletter that has all The Optimist Daily solutions included. If you wanna sign up for that, the link to do that is also in the show notes. 

Arielle: 

You can also follow us on socials. We are @optimistdaily on everything except for X. There we are @OdeToOptimism.

Karissa: 

And on socials you can reach out to us, say hi, share any comments, questions, or feedback, and you can also just email us at podcast@optimistdaily.com. We’d love to hear from you. 

Arielle: 

Mm-hmm. As usual, we would like to send a huge thank you to our financial supporters, our Emissaries. You guys help us keep this mission alive, and as a small thank you, we offer you The Optimist Daily shout-out perk.

If you haven’t taken advantage of that, the link to do that, we will be sending again soon. Uh, and that’s just an opportunity to shout out a local charity- A neighbor who helped you out with your gardening or something this weekend. Anybody that is just bringing positivity into your life. So it’s also another great way to share your gratitude for people.

Karissa: 

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much to our Emissaries, but also a huge thank you to all of our Optimists for listening to the podcast, reading and sharing solutions, and just trying to spread some more optimism wherever you go, wherever you are. And with that being said, I think we should get into what went right this week.

Colombia’s Amazon Protection

Arielle: 

I’m going to start us off with the first solution, “How Colombia’s outgoing president protected 42% of the country’s Amazon from mining”. Three days before a new president took office, and one who had campaigned on reviving oil drilling and legalizing fracking, Colombia’s outgoing president signed a resolution locking 186,500 square miles of the Amazon off from any new extraction.

On August 4th, 2026, President Gustavo Petro signed the resolution, and the incoming president, Abelardo de la Espriella, took office on August 7th. So they just squeezed that one in there, and now roughly 42% of Colombia is protected, and it’s the largest Amazon reserve ever created in the country. 

Karissa: 

A bold move to do that in such a tight window.

Arielle: 

Yeah, I know. Definitely just trying to, like, get that last one in there before another president who has, uh, you could say, opposing values comes in. 

Karissa: 

Mm-hmm. 

Arielle: 

Um, but the legal mechanism behind this is Article 47 of the Natural Resources Code, which is a 50-year-old statute allowing the state to exclude an entire region from private exploitation.

It’s been used before, but only piecemeal. It never applied to the whole Colombian Amazon at once. This means that three things are now prohibited: new mining concessions, new oil and gas contracts, and the environmental permits that accompany either. Still, existing permits will continue until expiry, and there are a number of active mining titles and pending applications, and 39 active oil and gas contracts that all remain.

But the main thing is that they can’t be renewed. 

Karissa: 

Well, that’s good, and I hope that this solution will kind of stand in this transition of the powers here in the country, so… 

Arielle: 

Yeah, hopefully it, it holds. Um, but if it does, then Colombia would be of the strictest of the eight Amazon-sharing nations, which includes Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela, Guyana, and Suriname.

Late Summer Weed Control

Arielle: 

Moving on from the Amazon to people’s more personal, uh, little plots of greenery. 

Karissa: 

That’s right. Your own personal Amazon. 

Arielle: 

Yeah, that’s my transition. Uh, the next solution is titled “The gardening window most people miss: late summer and early fall weed control”. Most gardeners put away the hoe in late summer and consider it done until spring.

A professor of horticulture has a different take, though. What you do in these last weeks before frost shapes how much weed work you face next year. A single dandelion can drop thousands of seeds that stay dormant in the soil for years, so getting ahead of that in fall is easier than dealing with it in April.

The source behind this article is Manjot Kaur Sidhu, a horticulture professor at the University of Maine, and he says that right now, basically, is the single best time of year for weed control that lasts. I remember my dad just battling with weeds, like- 

Karissa: 

Yeah …

Arielle: basically my whole childhood. I don’t know if he ever won the war with weeds. So if you check out this article, maybe you have a chance.

The Mercator Map Resolution

Arielle: 

The next solution is titled “The Mercator map has distorted Africa’s size for 450 years. The UN just voted to replace it.” On most world maps, Greenland and Africa look roughly the same size. Greenland covers about 2.2 million square kilometers.

Africa covers 30.4 million. The map has been wrong by a factor of 14 since 1569, and that error has been built into classrooms, conference rooms, and institutions ever since. 164 countries voted to fix that. So the UN General Assembly passed the Correct the Map resolution on September 5th, 2026. 164 nations voted in favor.

One voted against, which was the US, and then there were six abstentions. The resolution is sponsored by Togo and backed by the African Union’s 54 member states. It’s non-binding, but it’s still expected to drive changes to maps used by institutions worldwide. The Mercator map has been the global standard since 1569, and it was designed by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator.

I’m pretty sure that’s how you say it. Uh, although the Flemish have a different accent to the Dutch. He designed it to help European explorers navigate, and its distortion is a mathematical consequence of representing a globe on a flat surface. The map accommodates Earth’s curvature by making equatorial countries appear smaller and polar countries appear larger.

On the Mercator, Greenland and Africa look roughly the same size, as we mentioned before. Um, but yeah, it turns out that Africa is, like, 14 times larger, so it’s definitely not an accurate representation, let’s say. Yeah. 

Karissa: 

And as mentioned in this article, I mean, this map has implicitly downplayed Africa’s resources, population, and investment potential.

So it actually is really important that maps, you know, shape how regions are perceived politically and economically.

Arielle: 

Mm-hmm. I really like the quote from the Togolese, um, foreign minister, Robert Dussey. Uh, he said, “A fair world begins with a fair map,” and I couldn’t agree more. 

Elementic’s MO6 Carbon Tiles

Arielle:

All right, the next solution is called “Elementic’s MO6 is the building material claiming to lock away carbon for thousands of years”.

Lignin is the wood industry’s problem child. It comes off as a byproduct when timber is processed. It’s difficult to use, and it usually just gets burned for energy. A Finnish startup called Elementic decided to build a material out of it instead. The result is MO6, a wall tile made from 90% carbon that stores roughly twice the CO2 of wood and could keep it locked away for thousands of years.

This debut collection, MO6 Eternal, launched this month at Habitare in Helsinki as part of Helsinki Design Week. It’s a great use of this raw material that is usually considered too difficult to use. I like in this article that it kind of emphasizes that even though this is a really sustainable construction product, it’s being positioned more as a design object first and an environmental- Mm-hmm

product second, and then that framing changes who adopts it and how quickly they do that. So I guess it’s a little bit messed up that, like, people wouldn’t be more excited about, uh, an environmental product and that they’re more likely to adopt it if it’s seen as a design object, but this is just also a part of the strategy of creating a more sustainable world.

Karissa: 

I took a look at these panels, and they’re pretty cool. 

Arielle: 

Yeah, they’re pretty sleek. 

Karissa: 

Yeah, they’re very sleek, so I could definitely see something like this in hotels, spas, restaurants. 

Solar Ambulance in Kenya

Arielle: 

All right. The last article that I’m going to share with everyone before I hand it over to Karissa is titled “The world’s first solar ambulance just completed its first real-world test in rural Kenya.”

Most ambulances are built around one question: How fast can we get the patient to a hospital? In regions without hospitals nearby, that question just doesn’t have a useful answer. Stella Juva, a solar-powered ambulance built by students at a Dutch university, takes a different approach. It shows up, it parks, it extends its solar panels out to the side for shade, and while it’s stationary, it generates more power than all of its medical equipment uses combined.

So this cool little vehicle was developed by Solar Team Eindhoven at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. Stella Juva is road legal, built as an electric vehicle with fully integrated solar panels, energy stored in a 50, uh, kilowatt hour battery, allowing operations after dark. It’s designed for remote regions that lack reliable infrastructure, electricity, and fuel options.

And unlike a traditional ambulance, it does not transport patients to hospitals, but rather brings healthcare directly to communities who need it. 

Karissa: 

And one thing this article kind of notes is how energy poverty is a healthcare barrier around the world that rarely gets discussed directly, because most global health coverage focuses on training, drugs, and facilities.

But power is the invisible constraint here. 

Arielle: 

And it was built by students, not a major medical device company. Mm-hmm. Which makes it, I think, even cooler. Um, I love a student-led technical innovation with real-world deployment. And yeah, the fact that the proof of concept came from a university team shapes what will happen next, and is also why our Local Changemaker series this year is based on younger innovators.

Baked Bites: Frisco Students

Karissa: 

I’ll take it over from here. This one is called “Baked Bites: how Frisco students turned a passion for baking into a force for community change”. A group of students in Frisco, Texas started baking cookies to give back to their community. There wasn’t a GoFundMe involved, a sponsorship pitch, or a school project requirement.

They just homemade these baked goods, and sold through pre-orders and pop-ups, and every dollar is going directly to charity. They’ve raised over $8,000 for food insecure kids in their own school district, and the model, because it stays pretty simple, keeps working. Their Instagram handle is @bbaked_bites, and it operates through pre-orders and community pop-ups.

100% of proceeds go to charity, and there’s no overhead or admin cut taken by the organization. Their partner is Frisco Fastpacs, a nonprofit that delivers weekend meal bags to more than 1,200 food insecure children across Frisco ISD every Friday of the school year. For many of those kids, the bags are their primary source of food when school isn’t in session, so a really important initiative from their partner as well.

Karissa: 

Like we mentioned, they raised $8,000-plus since launching, and the founders frame this as hundreds of people choosing kindness. 

World’s Largest Electric Ferry

Karissa: 

The next solution is “The world’s largest battery-electric ferry just crossed an ocean”. A ship ordered as a diesel ferry in 2019 became the largest electric vehicle ever built of any kind on land or sea.

It spent the pandemic getting redesigned from the ground up, then it crossed an ocean on the back of a heavy lift transporter to reach the river it was always meant to cross. The world record was not part of the original plan here, but it actually broke a world record. So this is Hull 096, which is named China Zorrilla in service, is a 130-meter, 427-foot battery-electric ferry built by Tasmanian shipbuilder Incat in Hobart.

It was originally ordered in 2019 as a diesel ferry by Buquebus, and it was redesigned to full battery electric propulsion during the pandemic production pause. It’s the largest electric vehicle of any kind on land or sea. It runs on more than 5,000 battery modules built from aluminum rather than steel to reduce weight and improve efficiency, and a full charge gives roughly 90 minutes of running time, which is just enough for its route.

Travel Scams to Watch For

Karissa: 

The next solutions title is “Travel scams have gotten harder to spot. Here’s what changed and what to watch for.”. Summer travel is winding down, but before you put away the suitcase for good, it’s worth knowing that the scams targeting travelers have gotten significantly harder to spot. And with Thanksgiving and the holiday travel season a lot closer than it feels, now is a better time to think about this than at the airport gate.

The most dangerous travel scams today don’t really look suspicious. They actually look like a message you were already expecting. So this is just a great lifestyle solution that outlines a lot of scams that are out here. I mean, with the rise of AI tools, it’s made fake websites and communications substantially harder to detect.

So what used to look obviously fraudulent can now look really like routine correspondence. So- 

Arielle: 

Hmm … 

Karissa: 

lots of good tips in here, and honestly, a lot that I didn’t even know were going on, so I’m glad we reported on this. And- 

Arielle: 

Yeah … 

Karissa: 

according to an FTC report from June 2026, Americans lost $3.5 billion to imposter scams last year, and nearly one in three fraud reports involved an imposter.

Arielle: 

Yeah, the reservation hi- hijacking one really freaked me out ’cause that’s the one that actually looks legit. Mm-hmm. Basically, the scammers will phish hotel staff for login credentials, and then they will access your real booking data and then contact you with your actual reservation dates and the exact cost.

So you’re, you feel like this has to be the actual hotel. Um- Hmm … and so your, your, like, walls of defense go down, and you just follow whatever they ask you to do. For instance, if they want you to click a link or something or send information. So yeah, that one was, was surprising to me, and the advice is just to go to the hotel’s official website and call the number before- Hmm

you do anything. I would probably fall for that, and I feel like I’m usually pretty vigilant when it comes to, um, parsing out the scams. 

Karissa: 

Yeah. Like you were saying with this one, Arielle, I mean, booking platforms are so confusing already, um , in my opinion. I mean, like I, I was staying at a hotel recently and I used a third party.

And I mean, it ended up being okay, but when I was checking in, the person was like, “Uh, can… Are you from Shanghai, China? That’s what it says your address is.” And I was like, “Oh, no.” And he was like, “Oh, did you book through a third party? ‘Cause it will, like, when- wherever the third party is based, it’ll populate as that address.”

So thing’s already confusing back there, and it can get even more confusing when people are trying to scam you. 

Arielle: 

Yeah, for sure.

Berlin’s Rooftop Farm Supermarket

Karissa:

 The next solution we have is another really cool one in my opinion, and it’s “Berlin’s REWE supermarket: the grocery store with a working rooftop farm”. There’s a supermarket in Berlin where the lettuce on the shelf was growing on the roof just that morning.

The whole farm is built into the building, and it’s heated by waste heat from the refrigerators below, watered mostly by rain, and when the greens are ready, they come straight downstairs. There aren’t any trucks involved, distribution centers, or cold storage needed. It’s just a staircase. This REWE Lankwitz store in Berlin has a working rooftop with a hydroponic greenhouse, and the store was designed with the farm in mind from the start.

Skylights throughout the grocery floor let shoppers look up into what’s growing above them, and I think that is just such a cool concept and I wanna go to this grocery store. And I love all the circular systems that have been built into the building. Like I mentioned before, waste heat from the store’s refrigeration heats the greenhouse, and rainwater waters the plants, and solar provides additional power.

So this could definitely be the future of grocery stores. 

Arielle: 

Berlin is actually quite accessible to me. I have some friends there, so if I do end up visiting the supermarket, I will definitely let everyone on The Optimist Daily know. Um, and I just found it kind of eye-opening that, uh, this University of Groningen professor, Prajal Pradhan, published research that suggests that urban farming across Europe could supply up to 20 million metric tons of vegetables per year, and that’s around 28% of the continent’s total.

Uh, so that’s a pretty good chunk of our food security needs being met. 

Karissa: 

Hmm. Absolutely.

Low-Cost Hobbies for Joy

Karissa: 

The final solution that I have to share is one that I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast. It’s titled “8 low-cost hobbies that add hours of joy to your week”. Research suggests that having an active hobby adds about eight hours of genuine satisfaction to your week.

Not just fun, but the kind of deep satisfaction that also improves mood, stress response, and maybe most surprisingly, immune function. This is a list of eight hobbies that cost almost nothing to start, and at least a couple of them are probably ones you’ve never tried. For a little research context, the research cited was pursuing a passion hobby can add eight hours of joy per week, and that’s defined as deep satisfaction, gratification, and accomplishment.

Evidence also links hobbies to better mood regulation, stress management, and immune function. So the physical benefit here tends to surprise people. I know it surprised me, but I’m glad because I’ve really been trying to engage more in my hobbies. And it’s also just a low-cost premise because hobbies that fit easily into daily life are the ones most likely to stick, and there are so many hobbies out there that cost very little or maybe even nothing to do.

So we won’t go into all eight of the hobbies that they suggest here, but of course, there’s way more than eight hobbies that, um, you can incorporate into your weekly routine. I think one that you probably won’t be surprised that I found interesting is journaling and junk journaling. So junk journaling, if you’re not familiar, is this recent, like, trend where you put a whole bunch of things you’ve found over the week, whether it’s ticket stubs, receipts, fabric scraps, magazine clippings, and you put them all into some tactile pages.

So it’s largely things that you already have, and it’s a cool way to, to recap what you’ve been and doing and use all the, quote-unquote, “junk” you found. One more that I’ve been taking part of a lot recently is hiking because I do have a lot of access to really awesome trails nearby. And I’ve been going with my group of friends, and we’ve kind of called it our, uh, girl gang hikes recently.

So it’s been a very fun hobby to take part in on the weekend, and we’ve seen- Oh, cute … a lot of cool things. Yeah, and, um, another important point of this article is just mentioning how incorporating, you know, bringing a friend to your hobby is a great way to, uh, have that social aspect, and it makes you more likely to stick with your hobby.

Arielle: 

Hmm. 

Closing Quote & Outro

Karissa: 

Well, that’s all the solution news we had to share this week on The Optimist Daily. But before we leave, we’ll leave you with a positive quote that was featured in one of our daily newsletters this week. 

Arielle: 

I love this one. This is from Sandra Cisneros, who’s a… I believe she’s an American Chicana writer.

Um, the quote says, “The older I get, the more I’m conscious of ways very small things can make a change in the world. Tiny little things, but the world is made up of tiny matters, isn’t it?” 

Karissa: 

Mm. That one kind of gives me chills. I like that one- Yeah … a lot, ’cause it’s true, and I feel like that’s something we, we love to talk about on The Optimist Daily so much, is just how much our little collective actions can make the biggest difference.

So- 

Arielle: 

Mm. All right. Well, that’s a lovely note to end on. Karissa and I wish all of you Optimists and Emissaries and listeners out there a great weekend, um, and we will be back next week with more solutions.