Episode Description:

Dolphins fatally swim into fishing nets because the nylon is acoustically too similar to water for their echolocation to pick up. A researcher at Newcastle University wondered if attaching something that does produce an echo might change that. The dolphin-saving solution may surprise you.

Ten solutions this week with Arielle and Karissa. Also in the episode: energy storage technologies that sound like science fiction but are getting serious investment, India’s first domestically built hydrogen train, and the garden sign that looks like a win but means your plant is struggling to survive.

Stay tuned til the end for a wonderful Emissary Shout-Out that will brighten your day!

If you have questions, comments, feedback, suggestions, or just want to say hi, send a message to: podcast@optimistdaily.com.

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Theme and all original music by Marvin Lanes

Transcript:

Karissa: 

Hi, everyone. I’m Karissa. 

Arielle: 

I’m Arielle. 

Karissa: 

And welcome to The Optimist Daily’s weekly roundup. 

Arielle: 

Karissa and I are on trips, so we’re in different home studio setups. 

Karissa: 

Yeah, exactly. I am over here in Idaho. Yeah. 

Arielle: 

I’m in Sicily for the first time. Um- 

Karissa: 

Two different places, but- 

Arielle: 

Yeah. But it is always nice to, like, switch up the surroundings and shake things up in your environment.

Karissa: 

I’m visiting family right now, but then I’ll be taking a trip later in the week over to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, which I’ve never been to. Ooh. And I’ll get to experience Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons, which are some national parks I haven’t been to, but of course have been on my list. So 

Arielle: 

it’s all about beach for me, and chocolate.

Um, I’m in a city that is supposedly famous for their chocolate, and that’s perfect ’cause I’m on a girls trip, so it’s all kind of lining up. 

Karissa: 

Yeah, we’ll be taking a little bit of a break next week while we’re on these trips. And then the week after, we actually have an exciting guest interview with a familiar voice that some of you may remember.

Arielle: 

If you’re a longtime listener of The Optimist Daily podcast, then you will remember Kristy, who hosted the show with Summers McKay. She will be coming back, updating us on her very fascinating life, and she has quite a lot of words of wisdom and cool life experiences to share. So if you’re into renewable energy or if you’re going through a, mm, let’s say, unexpected life change and you’re needing to show, show up for yourself and others and be resilient, this episode will be for you.

So that’ll be coming up in two weeks. 

Karissa: 

But in the meantime, if you need some solutions while we’re away, you can always get them in our free daily newsletter. We also have a weekly edition if you get too many emails to your inbox already, and that weekly edition just covers all the 10 new solutions from The Optimist Daily that week.

Arielle: 

The link to sign up for that is in the show notes. Uh, but you can also follow us on socials if that’s how you prefer to get your news. We are @optimistdaily on everything, Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, um, everything except for X. There we are @odetooptimism. We’d love for you to come over and say hi.

Karissa: 

So if there’s any comments, questions, or feedback, you can always email us at podcast@optimistdaily, or reach out to us on any of those social media channels. 

Arielle: 

We have an Emissary shout-out for the end of this episode, so stay tuned for that. An Emissary shout-out is a perk that all of our Emissaries get.

Emissaries are financial supporters of The Optimist Daily, so we have big, big gratitude for them. But we also would love to thank all of our Optimists who are just here supporting us through listening to the podcast, reading our articles, sharing them with friends and family and loved ones, and yeah, interacting with us on social media, rating, subscribing, following, all of those things.

Karissa: 

So many ways to support The Optimist Daily that don’t have to cost a thing. But if you do wanna financially support The Optimist Daily and get these perks like the Emissary shout-out, the information on how to do that is linked in the show notes as well. 

Arielle: 

That was quite a bit of housekeeping, but I think we’re ready to jump into this week’s solutions.

Karissa: 

The first solution we had to share is titled “From molten salt to liquid air: clean energy’s weird storage revolution”. Generating clean energy from sun and wind is mostly a solved problem at this point, but storing it is the problem nobody has fully cracked yet. The solutions getting serious investment right now are genuinely kind of strange.

We’re talking about freezing air in Manchester and superheating industrial salt in Nevada, but these really strange solutions might be the ones that finally make the grid work around the clock. The two projects discussed in this article are Highview Power’s Carrington project, where surplus renewable power cools air to -321 degrees Fahrenheit, compressing it to 1/700 of its volume, very small, when the grid needs power, and the liquid warms and spins a turbine.

There’s no combustion here. It delivers 300 megawatts per hour of storage, which is enough for nearly half a million homes. The edge that liquid air has over the oh-so-popular lithium ion is duration. Lithium ion handles hours, but liquid air can sit for days or weeks, which means when you hit a stretch of overcast or windless weather, the liquid air can still store this energy.

And then the other project mentioned here is Crescent Dunes in Nevada, where 10,000 mirrors focus sunlight on industrial salts heated to 1,040 degrees Fahrenheit, and it holds that heat for up to 10 hours after sunset. You can get more details on that in the full article. Moving on to a lifestyle article we shared this week called “Soft decluttering: the low-pressure method for a tidier home”.

I guess first before I dive into this one, Arielle, is there anything that you just, like, haven’t cleaned around your house or life, I guess? 

Arielle: 

Um, yes. I have… So I think I do soft decluttering already. I, like, just tidy up around the house where I can. It also calms me down. But there are a number of what I call miscellaneous drawers.

And I just stuff things in there. If I don’t have the time or the energy to, to actually figure out where they belong or to throw them out even, I just stuff them in the drawer, close the drawer, and then it’s gone. I- Do you have something like that? 

Karissa: 

I am definitely guilty of that sometimes. I feel like I’m pretty good at the soft decluttering method, which we’ll get into in a second. Um, and I’ll kinda go through, like, big purges every once in a while, and I feel pretty organized right now because I did go through a pretty big purge of, like, my whole life. But one thing I do know is lingering is my craft drawer in my office.

It’s just so hard to organize these crafts. Crafting can get chaotic for me, so I do n- it’s something I refuse to open. This method of soft decluttering is taking on small, manageable tasks instead of full clean outs or complete purges, and it’s coined by professional organizers Jane Abrahams and Wendy Troons.

I think that’s how you pronounce it. 

Soft decluttering is the counter to the all-or-nothing trap, where you think it’s either a massive overhaul or nothing, so you pick nothing. And of course, that’s the perfection paralysis. Small wins can really build real momentum, so daily little habits compound into bigger changes over time.

This article gives a lot of great tips on how to incorporate soft decluttering into your life, and some places to start are the entryway of your house where there’s high visibility and there’s immediate payoff because you enter through it every day. The fridge, because you can do a weekly sweep that takes under 10 minutes and also cut your food waste out.

Junk drawers, like you mentioned, Arielle, your car, and also digital spaces. 

Arielle: 

Yeah, it’s, it’s definitely something I could improve upon. Whenever I see the junk drawers or the miscellaneous drawers, I’m just like, “Ooh, I have to really get into it if I, if I start.” But again, kind of like the digital decluttering article that we had a couple weeks ago.

Karissa: 

Mm-hmm. 

Arielle: 

You don’t have to do it all at once. I don’t know what that mental block is for me, but reading this article definitely gives me permission to just skip over that and just tell myself it’s okay if I do a little bit. It’s better, actually, if I do a little bit. 

Karissa: 

Yeah, absolutely. Moving on to the next solution, “The physics of what happens when you suppress a sneeze.”

As a researcher at Washington University breaks down, what’s happening to your body when you do that is pretty alarming, and it’s kind of a lot of pressure that happens up in the nose and throughout the body. Have you ever heard of the playground myth that holding in a sneeze can make your eyeballs pop out, Arielle?

Arielle: 

I don’t think so, but I, I know people who hold in their sneezes. It kind of freaks me out a little bit because I’ve, I don’t even know how you would do that. Like, my sneezes are so present that I don’t think I could hold them back if I tried. 

Karissa: 

Yeah, exactly. Luckily, I was never taught to keep in a sneeze, and I also don’t know how you can keep in a sneeze.

But I mean, people definitely do do it, and it’s not so great because sneezing is an open pressure release system, and it blocks the exits, and the force has to go somewhere. As quoted in this article, it says, “The diaphragm and intercostal muscles function as a gun while air pressure serves as a bullet, and that bullet has to go somewhere.”

So all of this pressure can result in possible injuries, which include ruptured eardrums, middle ear barotrauma, damage to the tissue lining in the throat, air trapped under the skin of the neck, and air leaking between the lungs. These are rare, but it’s good to know that these are possibilities, so if you do have the habit of suppressing a sneeze, you can move beyond that.

This solution is not meant to scare anyone, but it’s supposed to remind us that the best option here is to sneeze into a tissue if available or your elbow. 

Arielle: 

Yeah, the gun and bullet metaphor is kind of, um, it does kind of scare me a little bit. But uh, what I think is that if you are, if your body is expelling something, it’s expelling it for a reason.

Yes. And you should just let it happen. Just let it go. 

Karissa: 

Anyways, moving on from the sneezes. The next solution is called “Roadside milkweed is giving monarchs a new migration highway”. Researchers in Florida are turning highway road margins into a migration highway for monarch butterflies, and they’re not waiting for new conservation land to do it.

They’ve planted 9,000 milkweed plants so far along roads in six counties, with 6,000 more going in before 2029, and the monarchs are already showing up and traveling along this new highway that has been planted for them. So this is a really cool University of Florida project, and it’s part of a national effort led by University of Illinois in Chicago to turn road margins, power line easements, and rail corridors into pollinator habitats.

They have chosen roadsides because protected land isn’t keeping up with habitat loss, but managed land is everywhere and gets maintained on a schedule regardless. So the question here was whether that work can be redirected to include some conservation measures, and it looks like it can. They chose milkweed specifically because if you know anything about monarchs, monarchs, um, love milkweed, and monarch caterpillars evolved to tolerate the plant’s toxic glycosides, but the trade-off is total.

They can no longer digest anything else, and when milkweed disappears, monarchs disappear with it. But there’s other insects that benefit from the milkweed as well. Bees, moths, wasps, flies, and ants also feed on milkweed nectar. So being able to plant this along the side of the roads is… It’s kind of, I love the dual imagery here of, like, a road that’s already, you know, providing routes for people, but then also for insects, monarchs, and stuff.

Moving on to the last solution that I wanted to talk about today, “Data centers explained: the hidden infrastructure behind your daily digital life”. Every time you stream something, pay a bill, or ask an AI a question, a building you probably don’t think about makes it happen. And now communities all over the US are fighting to stop more of those buildings from going up in their backyards.

This article is a full explainer on what data centers are, what they cost to the people who live near them, and why New York just became the first state to ban them outright. Data centers have been coming more into focus, I would say, as the discussion of AI has been much more prevalent, but they’ve been around, they’ve been a thing, and more of them wanna go up, and that’s not always the best thing because they have a lot of negative side effects.

But a lot of us, including myself, don’t really know exactly what data centers do. But basically, they are a building, you know, buildings actually, full of servers, storage systems, and networking equipment that run 24 hours a day, every day, to power streaming, banking, AI, search, and everything else digital.

So it’s not just AI, but the rise of AI is making data centers more, um, needed. And I mean, the appetite is hard to overstate because a single large AI-era data center can use as much electricity as 100,000 homes and draw up to 5 million gallons of water a day just for cooling it down. It’s just very energy resource intensive.

There’s so many issues besides, you know, the using electricity problem, but, um, there’s also of course the water problem, as briefly mentioned there, is because a midsize data center draws as much water as a small town, which that’s a lot of water. And air quality from the construction can run for years with sustained diesel truck traffic.

That of course can lead to more health problems for communities with asthma cases and premature deaths on the rise. And there’s also a job promise versus a reality because there’s this promise that more jobs will be created from constructing AI sites, but those aren’t permanent jobs. Um, once they’re done, then all those workers, you know, won’t really be employed.

So there’s a lot of information in this article if you wanna find out more behind the scenes about data centers. 

Arielle: 

All right. Well, I am going to take it from here. The first solution that I’m going to share today is called “Three signs your garden is overheating and what to do about each one”. So if you’ve ever walked outside in July or just in the thick of summer and found your garden drooping and then immediately reached for the hose, then this story is for you.

I don’t have a garden, but I can imagine that Often when you see your plant suffering, you feel like you wanna give them a drink, um, but that could be the wrong call it turns out. Pro gardeners share what they do when a plant is heat stressed, and the most important move happens before you even pick up that watering can or hose.

There’s a bunch of heat stress signs, wilting that sticks around into morning or evening, so not just the mid-afternoon droop, uh, leaves curling or rolling inward, browning or scorching at the edges, and the one that I thought was super counterintuitive was premature flowering. I think if I were tending a garden and then the flowers came early, I’d be like, “Oh my gosh, I’m such a good gardener.”

Karissa: 

Uh-huh. 

Arielle: 

But that is actually a sign that, uh, your plant is stressed out. The plant is redirecting energy towards reproduction because it’s struggling to survive. The article goes through a bunch of tips that you can use, uh, before watering anything, like sticking your finger in the top inch or two of soil, see if it’s wet, because if it is wet, then more water will likely make things worse.

So overwatering, underwatering, compacted soil, and root rot can all look the same from the outside, and the soil check helps narrow down what the actual problem is. Prevention does beat rescue. General guidelines to follow, uh, are to water deeply in the early morning and direct it to the soil around the roots, not onto leaves or stems.

And it’s important to note that even full sun plants can benefit from temporary shade on extreme heat days, and we’re getting a lot more of extreme heat days, uh, now. So a shade cloth or even old bed sheets draped over them during peak afternoon hours can help them out. The next article had a very surprising title to me.

It’s called “The Newcastle researcher turning ocean plastic into a dolphin rescue strategy”. Ocean plastic is usually the villain in marine wildlife stories, and for good reason. But this one is different. A researcher at Newcastle University is attaching empty plastic bottles to fishing nets, and it’s actually helping dolphins survive them.

The mechanism is pretty weird, pretty fascinating. Just to explain how this works, there are gill nets that hang vertically in the water, and they are nearly invisible to dolphin echolocation. Um, the nylon is too sparse and acoustically too similar to water to produce a return signal, so dolphins won’t detect any danger and will swim into them.

And of course, that, that injures them, or worst case scenario, will even kill them. Current numbers say that around 1,000 porpoises and hundreds of dolphins, including 250 common dolphins, die in UK gill nets every year alone. Professor Per Berggren at Newcastle University asked the question, what if you gave the net something that does produce an echo?

Plastic bottles are what he decided to use. The air inside reflects echolocation clicks, giving dolphins a strong return signal that they can read and respond to. And then there’s also glass bottles, uh, with metal bolts inside that create a clinking sound as they move in the water, and that passive noise cue works alongside or instead of echolocation.

There have been a few trials across 1,600 nets in Zanzibar, Peru, and Brazil, and the study or the results were published in Fisheries Research and Marine Mammal Science. There were a lot of really positive results, but the Peru results were mixed, and for nets set near the surface, bottles didn’t reduce dolphin bycatch, but did increase target fish catch.

So yeah, it also increased shark bycatch. So I guess this is still being studied and developed as a solution. But overall, it seems that attaching plastic bottles can rescue dolphin bycatch globally. And honestly, it’s a solution that every fisher can afford to do. 

Karissa: 

Hmm. Yeah, that’s the important part here is that, you know, it’s a low-cost solution, and it’s more accessible than these, you know, really fancy, expensive technologies that not, not all fishers can afford.

Arielle: 

Yeah, I think it’s particularly optimistic to know that the source of the problem can also be part of the solution. Um, and in case you’re wondering, no plastic bottles were lost during the trial, so it, this study did not contribute more to ocean plastic. The next solution is titled: “What India’s hydrogen train launch means for its vast railway network”.

So India just launched a hydrogen-powered train, and the interesting part isn’t just that it runs on hydrogen, it’s that it was built locally. It was built in India. This is a country of 1.4 billion people with one of the world’s largest rail networks, and this is the first step toward cleaning up the diesel routes.

So this domestically built hydrogen-powered train launched in July, um, I think it was the 18th of July. Um, and it was named the Namo Green Rail, which Namo is a common abbreviation of the Prime Minister Modi’s name, so his name is Narendra Modi, Namo. Um, just for people who are unfamiliar, hydrogen fuel cells combine hydrogen and oxygen to generate electricity, and the only direct emission is water vapor.

This pilot train also includes hydrogen storage and refueling infrastructure, and they’re kind of testing the whole system, not just the train itself. India’s net zero target is 2070, and this is part of a national push to develop green hydrogen domestically and cut transport emissions. Several other countries have already developed hydrogen trains, um, but India’s version stands out because it was built in country.

Karissa: 

The self-reliant India here shows that it’s not just a clean energy story, it’s an industrial capability story of India and other countries being able to produce this inside their own countries. 

Arielle: 

The next solution is more of a lifestyle one, and it kind of links to a solution that we talked about last week, Karissa.

It’s titled: “The case for clearing your calendar one weekend a month”. Most of us have spent the summer going to things we were excited about basically all summer, and now it might feel like we’re just getting through it. This story is about the empty weekend or, like, the one weekend a month with nothing on the calendar, and why it might be the most restorative thing you can do for the rest of the summer.

Now, last week, Karissa and I were talking about why summer days feel like they’re going so fast and why the summer season feels like it just disappears, and part of that reason is because we’re not taking enough time just to relax and enjoy and kind of do nothing but appreciate what’s right in front of you.

So this article is kind of a complement to that, and it goes deeper into this, um, one empty weekend a month idea, which started with parents who were done with the nonstop churn of kids’ weekend activities. And then in response to that, they canceled everything and had some of the best days they’d had in months.

I don’t know about you, Karissa, but I’m guilty of filling my weekends by reflex. So it just feels like I should be doing something, and an open Saturday can feel almost suspicious, like you must be forgetting something that you scheduled. Hmm. Or, like, you feel the guilt, the sunshine guilt of, like, needing to do something with the good weather.

Karissa: 

I feel like I’m definitely guilty of that as well. I mean, it’s kind of this big trap of treating an empty weekend like it can just be a productive weekend instead. And so it’s important to resist, you know, the urge to tackle some home projects and stuff, so. 

Arielle:

Yeah, you make a good point, that even when you do have a weekend day with nothing planned, you end up being, like, quote, unquote, productive

’cause you feel like you have to do something with it. So yeah, I, I feel like I would struggle with this, but I am gonna try and have, like, one weekend for the rest of the summer. I mean, it’s August, so- … I only have basically one more month to do this. Um- I know. Me too … but I’m gonna try to just have that one weekend where I don’t do anything.

Um- 

Karissa: 

Yeah, exactly. And of course, the solution extends past summer as well. It’s, uh, good to keep in mind just year-round that it’s okay to take a weekend to actually just rest and restore. 

Arielle: 

The last solution that I’m going to share this week is called “Oakland kids can now borrow sports gear for free at this special library”.

Youth sports in the US now cost the average family over 1,000 a year per child, and that number is still climbing. A park supervisor in East Oakland had a little budget left at the end of the year and an idea. This is the story of the sports equipment lending library she built for a neighborhood that’s been making do without enough for a long time.

As I mentioned, youth sports cost the average US family $1,016 a year per child, and that’s up 46% since 2019. And in Oakland, just 14% of kids get the recommended 60 minutes of daily physical activity, compared to the 23% nationally. So this Park Play Lending Library opened early in July, July 11th, at the Larry E. Reid Sports Center in Brookfield Village, East Oakland, in case you’re familiar with the area. And there you can check out a soccer ball, a football, volleyball, yoga mat, or tennis equipment, and then take it to the park, have your fun, and bring it right back. There’s actually also board games, too, because the community asked for that, so those are now available.

And basically the goal is anything that gets people outside and moving. 

Karissa: 

Mm-hmm. 

Arielle: 

This idea, it’s based on Oakland and Berkeley’s long-running Tool Lending Libraries. So it’s just the same logic applied to sports. 

Karissa: 

This is a pilot, but if it holds, the plan is adding one lending library per Oakland district, stocked based on what each community requests.

And also, um, they wanna partner with local sports organizations so they can make this equipment more accessible to more people. And this is a model that’s easily able to be replicated in other communities, so I think it’s very interesting. And yeah, I mean, sports are very expensive. I remember as a child, um, when I was in youth sports, like I did cheerleading, for instance, and every year that’s like a $500 bill for my parents, and that was like 20 years ago.

But I mean, it’s even more now. It was expensive having to get all the uniforms and the stuff we needed, and pay for, like, the coaches and stuff. So it’s really expensive and can be unaccessible for a lot of people. 

Arielle: 

Yeah, and that’s just not fair because there’s so many benefits to playing team sports.

I wouldn’t really know them ’cause I didn’t do that. I was so not coordinated as a kid, and, like, very shy and insecure about joining anything team-related. Um- 

Karissa: 

Mm-hmm … 

Arielle: 

but my sisters played sports, and they still do, and I know that they gained a lot of, uh, you know, leadership and teamwork, and all- Yeah … of these things that can help you later on in your life.

So if money is the barrier, then we should do everything we can to tear that barrier down. 

Karissa: 

Mm-hmm. Absolutely. 

Arielle: 

Those were all the solutions that we had on The Optimist Daily this week, but we do have an Emissary shout-out from Marc and Lena-Maria. 

Karissa: 

Yeah. Thank you, Marc and Lena-Maria, for supporting The Optimist Daily.

They wanted to shout out James Arbib and Tony Seba’s RethinkX. RethinkX is a fully independent, not-for-profit organization, and they produce impartial research on global technology disruptions to accurately predict system change and guide humanity to an age of super abundance and freedom. Their research is freely available to everyone everywhere, and you can find all that on rethinkx.com.

So a really cool nonprofit that is investigating all these technologies. 

Arielle: 

Mm-hmm. And emphasis on impartial. We really need that, um, objective kind of look at things. So yeah, this seems really great. We are going to link it in the show notes as always. And once again, a huge thank you to Marc and Lena-Maria for being a part of this, um, solutions-minded mission that we are trying to encourage the world to come along with us on.

If you are an Emissary and you want to send a shout-out over to us, like Marc and Lena-Maria did, then that link should be in your inbox somewhere. Um, but Karissa and I will send it out again sometime soon, or you can email us at podcast@optimistdaily.com to find that link again. And we’ll just send it to you directly.

If you’re not an Emissary yet and you want to be, again, you can find out how to do that in the show notes. 

Karissa: 

Well, before we sign off for this time, we have a positive quote to share with you. 

Arielle: 

So this is from Cora Coralina, and she was a Brazilian writer and poet. “Recreate your life, always. Remove the stones.

Plant rose bushes and make sweets. Begin again.” 

Karissa: 

I love that one. There’s always time to recreate your life, so. 

Arielle: 

Hmm. It’s never too late to restart. Well, Karissa, I hope you enjoy your trip. 

Karissa: 

Yeah. And I hope you enjoy your trip as well, Arielle. It’ll be a great time to refresh, restore, and adventure a bit.

But I’ll be looking forward to sharing the solutions on The Optimist Daily again when we return. 

Arielle: 

All right. Well, thank you everyone for tuning in, and we wish you a wonderful weekend.