Episode Description:

An approach to treating degenerative blindness has been in development for more than ten years across research institutions in Spain. The result is not a surgery, a gene therapy, or an implant. It is eye drops. Light-activated compounds that restored vision in blind animal models by stepping in where lost photoreceptors used to be, without disturbing the underlying disease.

Arielle and Karissa cover eight solutions this week, including the country’s broadest AI ban for over half a million students, a urine test that spots bladder cancer with 92% accuracy, and what steel wind turbine foundations are inadvertently doing for marine life around Long Island. 

Nominate a Local Changemaker (30 and under): https://us20.list-manage.com/survey?u=d2e7810fd2bcf24fb1144a7e2&id=6e0ab37520&e=28025b5010

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Theme and all original music by Marvin Lanes

Transcript:

Karissa: 

Hi, everyone. I’m Karissa. 

Arielle: 

And I’m Arielle. 

Karissa: 

And welcome back to The Optimist Daily’s Weekly Roundup. 

Arielle: 

Yes, welcome back. It’s so nice to be here. Karissa, how was your Labor Day this week? 

Karissa: 

Oh, it was lovely. I spent some time in Yosemite National Park, so lots of hiking and strolling around the valley floor there.

And yeah, nice to have an extra day of rest. But summer is officially over, quote-unquote. Still pretty hot out, but we’re moving into the new season. 

Arielle: 

Mm-hmm. I definitely feel the seasons changing. It’s been quite rainy and a little bit colder here in the Netherlands. Um, but I’m… Honestly, the rain is quite nice.

It’s been a very hot summer with all the heat waves through Central Europe. Mm-hmm. Um, so yeah. I’m actually kind of looking forward to the wind-down of summer and the beginning of fall. 

Karissa: 

Yeah. Because of Labor Day, we only had eight solutions on The Optimist Daily this week. As always, these solutions can be found on the website at optimistdaily.com, and they also go out in the free daily newsletter.

Arielle: 

The link for that is in the show notes. And we also have a weekly version, so that one you would get on Fridays, and it’s just a little bit of a summary of the 10, or in this case, eight solutions that we had over the week 

Karissa: 

And all of our solutions are also on our social media channels. We’re @optimistdaily on just about everything, except on X, where we’re @odetooptimism.

Arielle: 

And if you have any comments, questions, or feedback, you can reach us on those social channels. You can slide into our DMs, you can interact with us in the comments, or you can email us at podcast@optimistdaily.com. 

Karissa: 

As always, we wanna thank our Emissaries who financially support The Optimist Daily. Your support makes this mission possible.

Arielle: 

But for all the Optimists out there who are supporting us in non-financial ways, such as leaving a five-star rating or positive review, listening to the podcast and, and forwarding it to friends and family, visiting our news site, and sharing articles on your social media stories, or just sending them directly to, uh, anyone who needs a little bit of a boost during their day, that is greatly appreciated.

We really love you guys, and this community is what makes this work so special. 

Karissa: 

And speaking of community, we need your help, because it is time, again, for our Local Changemakers series. 

Arielle: 

Mm-hmm. Yes. If you have been with us for a while, then you’ll know that every year around Thanksgiving, we do our Local Changemakers series, and it’s one of the favorite things that we do all year.

Karissa: 

It’s a series that reminds us that optimism isn’t just a feeling. It’s all about the people. It’s a neighbor showing up, a small group actually solving something, an idea that somehow becomes real. 

Arielle: 

This year, we’re gonna do it a little bit differently. For 2026, we’re dedicating the whole series to changemakers 30 years old and under.

Karissa: 

Yeah, and honestly, it felt like an obvious choice, because so many of the stories we cover, which can be, like, food programs, conservation projects, and community spaces, are being built by young people. They’re not waiting around for someone to hand them a plan. 

Arielle: 

And we want to find them and actually give them a platform.

So this year, every featured changemaker gets their own full article, and there’s no shared spotlight. 

Karissa: 

And the thing is, we need your help finding these changemakers. Do you know a young person 30 or under who is doing something real and impactful in their community? Someone you know personally, someone you’ve seen covered locally, or a project you’ve watched grow, perhaps?

Arielle: 

Please nominate them. The link is in the show notes. And we don’t really have a closing date at the moment, but we will let you guys know once we decide on one. Featured changemakers will go up in late October and November, right in the lead-up to Thanksgiving. 

Karissa: 

Yeah. So it’ll at least be open for a couple of weeks, but everyone who submits a nomination gets entered into a raffle to win an Optimist Daily mug as well.

Arielle: 

Mm-hmm. We genuinely cannot wait to see who you introduce us to. 

Karissa: 

Yes. And like Arielle mentioned, the link is in the show notes, so go nominate someone and show your gratitude for what they do. We’d love to recognize them here on The Optimist Daily. 

Arielle: 

Mm. All right. Well, now it’s time to recognize the solutions that we shared this week.

So Karissa, do you wanna take it away? 

Karissa: 

The first solution we shared this week is “At-home urine test spots bladder cancer in nine of ten cases.” An NHS trial just tested an at-home urine test against nearly 1,000 patients across seven hospitals in England and Scotland, and it caught bladder cancer in 92% of cases.

When the result came back negative, there was better than a 99% chance the patient was actually in the clear. So this test is really cool, and it’s called Galeas. It was developed at the University of Birmingham with Cancer Research UK funding and licensed to a diagnostics company, Nonacus, and the results were published in the European Urology Oncology.

So this test scans urine for cancer DNA. It checks for more than 450 mutations across 23 genes linked to bladder cancer. And in these trial results, as mentioned, there was a 92% detection rate and a 99+% accuracy when negative, which is huge. That’s very accurate. 

Arielle: 

Yeah, that’s as close to 100% you can get.

Michelle Mitchell, the Cancer Research UK, uh, rep, who was quoted in this article says, “Too many people are waiting longer than they should for a bladder cancer diagnosis, and it’s essential that we find ways to tackle this problem.” 

Karissa: 

Mm. Absolutely. It kind of reminds me, a couple weeks ago we shared one about an oral cancer diagnostic.

What was it, like a swab? Mm-hmm, yeah. I think that could be at home, too. Yeah. And if this technology could work for more cancers, and we’re kind of seeing this trend, I guess, of these at-home tests that have great accuracy, then cancer screening at a larger scale could be so much better.

The next solution we had is “The neuroscience of motivation: what orexin neurons reveal about staying the course”. Researchers in Japan just figured out something surprisingly specific about how the brain decides whether a task is even worth the effort and it comes down to one type of neuron that you probably have not heard of.

It isn’t about dopamine or willpower. It’s a completely different piece of the brain’s motivation machinery, and what they found about how it works is kind of counterintuitive. So Nagoya University researchers identified these orexin neurons in the hypothalamus, which was previously linked to wakefulness and energy regulation as the brain’s apparent mechanism for tracking the effort-reward relationship in real time.

There was a study here that used rats and food rewards, and it was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The method was to genetically activate or suppress orexin neurons while monitoring activity during tasks, and the results here is that if this neuron was activated, rats worked harder.

If they suppressed them, then rats quit sooner. 

Arielle: 

Hmm. I find that most motivation research has focused on dopamine. Mm-hmm. And I hadn’t actually heard of orexin, so yeah, it’s a newer and less understood territory. But in general, the science of motivation is everywhere right now. There’s a bunch of research on productivity and executive function and ADHD, um, but most of it isn’t really backed by this level of mechanistic neuroscience.

Karissa: 

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Motivation disorders show up in both depression and addiction, so knowing which neurons actually handle the effort-reward calculation is a real foothold for understanding what goes wrong here and how to fix it. The next solution we have to share is “Beyond the thrift store: where your donations do more good.” When you’re clearing out the house, the thrift store feels like an obvious move.

Drop it off and you’re done with it. But professional organizers say a lot of what people donate there sits on a rack for a few weeks and gets tossed away. So they’ve got six places where your stuff actually meets a specific need, and some of them will take things that the thrift store definitely will not.

There’s a couple that stood out to me, like animal shelters, for example, because they would actually take old towels and worn linens to line kennels and cages, and they also accept unopened pet food, cat litter, and pet toys in good condition. I mean, we probably all have old towels and linens around that we need to get rid of at some point.

I didn’t know this existed until semi-recently, but there’s these really cool, like, reuse arts and craft stores that take, you know, unused or partially used craft supplies, whether that’s canvases, paints, fabrics from unfinished projects, things like that. You can donate it here and they’ll resell it to other makers and it’s just a really, really cool place to visit.

I’ve been to one before and it was a crafter’s dream of a whole bunch of crazy pieces and stuff that, you know, a normal craft store isn’t gonna give you. And of course, keeping all that out of landfill is important, too. 

Arielle: 

I really like these articles that we have on donating and where to donate and where to make most impact.

Um, I think we had one recently for the beginning of the school year. Mm-hmm. Uh, what to donate to Goodwill or other thrift stores that would actually help people who are going back to school, whether they’re college age or grade school aged. But this piece really reframes the question to have you think about where your unwanted items are gonna have the most impact.

Um, and as we get into the holiday season with Thanksgiving coming up and also, uh, Christmas or other holidays around that time of year, a lot of people are thinking about where to donate things. So yeah, this is great. 

Karissa: 

Okay. So back to the health beat. We have a solution called “A simpler path to treating degenerative blindness: photoswitchable eye drops”.

There’s an approach to treating degenerative blindness that’s been in development for more than 10 years across several Spanish research institutions. And researchers just had a real breakthrough. They restored vision in blind animals using eye drops. No surgery, no gene therapy, no implants, just the drops.

Researchers at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia developed light-activated compounds called prosthe6. These light-activated compounds restored light perception and visually guided behavior in blind animal models. The target conditions in humans for this kind of research is age-related macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa, which together affect roughly 200 million people and cost an estimated $400 billion annually.

So I didn’t realize how many people were affected and how costly it can be. How it works is when photoreceptors die, the deeper retinal circuitry is often still intact, but has nothing to respond to. So prosthe6 substitutes for the lost photoreceptors by responding to light itself. So yeah, they’ve done some really interesting trials here on animals.

The next step is to move this into clinical trials for humans to see if just a simple eye drop could reverse blindness, another accessible healthcare win potentially- 

Arielle: 

Mm-hmm. And 200 million people with degenerative blindness is a massive unmet need, and I know that, um, AMD runs in my family. I think it’s really common.

Mm-hmm. Uh, so yeah, gene therapy helps only a small fraction because it requires specific gene mutations, and this eye drop delivery method is what will make it more accessible to a lot more people. The field has been dominated by invasive procedures and specialized equipment and all of that, but if it’s just an eye drop, then that seems almost too good to be true.

Karissa: 

Mm-hmm. Exactly. All right, Arielle, well, do you wanna take over the rest of the solutions for the week? 

Arielle: 

Yes. I am gonna start with this headline: “NYC schools issue the country’s broadest AI ban, covering pre-K through” eighth grade. So New York City just did something no school district in the country has done before.

It’s banned AI for more than 500,000 kids, and the mayor’s explanation for why wasn’t about screen time or safety. It was something more fundamental than that So New York City Public Schools, the nation’s largest school district, banning generative AI for all pre-K through eighth grade students for the 2026-2027 school year, uh, is a big deal.

The district calls it the most expansive AI moratorium any school district in the country has ever issued, and the ban covers student-facing AI software and companion chatbots. So teachers are exempt, and also high school students are exempt, but, uh, the high school students will get twice yearly AI literacy classes.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani says that, “The tech industry wants us to believe that AI-powered early education is not only inevitable, but necessary. We do not see it that way.” And the school’s chancellor, Kamar Samuels, framed it as protecting critical thinking, the capacity students lose when they outsource work before they’ve built the ability to do it themselves.

This is the first AI ban, but considering that AI is just, uh, becoming such a, uh, I wanna say invasive but- Yeah … uh, it, it’s, it’s, it’s kind of taking over all industries and so many aspects of life. So I’m sure this is just the beginning, and there will be more at least regulation with AI in schools. 

Karissa: 

Yeah, I was really excited to see this headline because, as you said, I mean, AI has been moving into classrooms just so quickly, and so it’s really the first major institutional pushback at such a large scale.

But I think it’s a good thing that in high school they’ll be having twice yearly AI literacy classes because it’s gonna be so important that, you know, kids are literate in AI and- Mm … uh, can use it properly. But I think banning it at the younger level where it’s so important to develop these critical thinking skills is so important for developing minds.

Um, but yeah, I mean, AI is gonna be part of our lives, but I think managing it and integrating it properly is the overarching challenge for our species. 

Arielle: 

Yeah, it’s a really fine line. As you said, Karissa, people need to be AI literate, but, um, they need to learn how to think and work for themselves. So we’ll see how this pans out.

Um, even if it doesn’t work perfectly, I think it is a step in the right direction to consider how we can regulate such powerful technology, especially for our children. 

Karissa: 

Mm-hmm. 

Arielle: 

All right, the next headline is ” New heart attack guidelines correct decades of under-diagnosis in” Women. The four biggest cardiovascular health organizations in the world just agreed on a universal heart attack definition for the first time ever, and the reason it matters, the reason it took this long, is that the old system had a flaw built into it that had been sending women to worse care for decades.

So this is kind of like the classic medical gender gap, where a lot of the medical information we have is based on men’s bodies and not women’s bodies. Yeah. Um, so yeah, this is a great headline. I didn’t even know that there wasn’t a universal heart attack definition already, but it’s great that we’ve landed on one.

Um, the four organizations that have aligned are the European Society of Cardiology, American College of Cardiology, American Heart Association, and the World Heart Federation, and they announced this change at the ESC Congress in Munich, and it was also published in the European Heart Journal. So the two specific changes with big implications for women are, number one, three heart attack types upgraded to the same classification tier as the clot-caused attacks that have always set the terms for cardiac care.

All three are up to 10 times more common in women. And then the second one is the sex-specific troponin thresholds, the blood test that has been missing heart attacks in female patients for years. Um, so I’m not going to get super into all of the, the science and everything, but it’s important to note that the gender gap in cardiac care has been documented for years, and this is a formal coordinated step to close it, not just bringing awareness to the problem.

Karissa: 

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I’m glad that this is going in the right direction, of course. And SCAD has actually gotten more public attention in recent years because of high-profile cases in young, apparently healthy women. So hopefully going forward, this will answer some questions and, you know, help people get the proper care.

Arielle: 

Mm-hmm. Yeah, and SCAD is the spontaneous coronary artery dissection, which is a tear in the artery wall that affects women in about 80% of cases, often during or shortly after pregnancy. Um- Mm-hmm … so yeah, I mean, we’re both women, so we have- 

Karissa: 

Yeah, exactly. 

Arielle: 

The next solution I have is titled ” How offshore wind foundations became accidental reef habitat”.

When engineers drove 54 steel cylinders into the sea floor off Long Island to anchor Empire Wind 1’s turbines, the goal was to hold up 810 megawatts of generating capacity. What, what wasn’t in the plans? Eight years of data from Taiwan suggesting those same kinds of steel foundations are turning into something that looks a lot like a reef, even though nobody designed them to do that.

So I really like, um, these compound solutions where there’s one- Mm-hmm … solution about one thing, in this case, uh, the wind turbines, so renewable energy, and then it helps something else unintentionally. So we all know that our coral reefs are struggling, and these turbine cylinders or these, like, foundations for them are actually giving the coral reefs a boost.

There’s a study from Taiwan that I mentioned earlier, uh, and it studied Formosa Wind Farm, which is 69 tu- turbines running in similar sandy reef-free water since 2017. This particular study found 86 reef-associated fish species clustered within 50 meters, so that’s about 165 feet, of turbine foundations, and, uh, the surrounding sandy areas had none.

Over eight years, the sea floor around the structures went from bare sand to something resembling a mature reef community. Um, why is that, you might ask? Well, sandy sea floor moves, and mussels, barnacles, sponges, and anemones need stable surfaces to attach, and that’s what the steel monopiles and rock-armored layer at the bases of these turbines provided.

Once the invertebrates got a foothold, then crabs and small fish follow, and then larger predators come for those, and it kind of creates this whole ecosystem. Um, but what the real question is, is are these foundations creating new marine production, or are they just kind of concentrating fish that were already living nearby?

And then that answer will change the ecological math significantly. Yeah. Um, so right now at the University of Rhode Island, there’s a researcher named Emmanuel Oyewole, and he has this ongoing Jonah crab research designed to answer the concentration versus creation question. And yeah, we’re still waiting to see what he finds, but in any case, it’s, uh, promising to see, you know, more life in, in these, uh, otherwise sandy and barren waters.

Karissa: 

Absolutely. 

Arielle: 

All right. So the last solution that we have is called “Heart failure and valve disease spotted in seconds by new AI ECG tool”. So another, uh, yet another big win for health. Um, there’s a test that about a billion people take every year. It’s been around for a century, and until now, it couldn’t tell you whether you had heart failure or heart valve disease.

You kind of needed a separate scan for that. And in most places, you’d wait months for one. A trial of 67,000 patients just showed that an AI model running on that same familiar test, which is the ECG, which stands for an electrocardiogram, can catch most of those cases in under two seconds. So, this AI tool was developed at Imperial College London with British Heart, uh, Foundation fundings.

And it was presented at the European Society of Cardiology Congress in Munich, which we had already mentioned in another solution. 

Karissa: 

Hmm. 

Arielle: 

This trial of 67,000 US patients caught heart failure in up to 81% of cases and heart valve disease in up to 90%, all from a standard ECG that runs in under two seconds.

An ECG is just a simple and painless medical test that records the electrical activity of your heart. Um, and it’s very, very common. So, uh, how it works is that it detects patterns in ECG signals that fall outside what the human eye typically picks up. And, um, a use case is that it flags high-risk patients for faster echocardium follow-up.

It’s not a replacement for the scan, but it is a prioritization tool. 

Karissa: 

Mm-hmm. Great. I mean, another wonderful, accessible healthcare development, hopefully, and more great heart news. 

Arielle: 

Yeah, I know. It’s been a, a pretty medically heavy week for us at The Optimist Daily. Um, but yeah, we’re really happy to be reporting on this kind of development ’cause health is wealth.

Karissa: 

Mm-hmm. Health is wealth indeed. But before we go, we have a positive quote to leave you off with, and it kind of deals with wealth as well. 

Arielle: 

This one is from Louisa May Alcott. And she said, “Simple, genuine goodness is the best capital to found the business of this life upon. It lasts when fame and money fail, and it is the only riches we can take out of this world with us.”

Very wise words on what true wealth is. 

Karissa: 

Well, that’s all we have for you today. Don’t forget to check out the link in the show notes to nominate a young local change-maker. 

Arielle: 

In the meantime, Karissa and I hope you have a wonderful weekend, and we will be back next week with more solutions. 

Karissa: 

Bye, everyone. 

Arielle: 

Bye!