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Rest of the World Report | Good News Edition! · The Rest of the World Podcast

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  [music]
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  SPEAKER_00: Good morning from Paris.
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  SPEAKER_00: I'm Rudy Martinez with The Rest of the World Report for Sunday, September 27th.
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  SPEAKER_00: Sunday, my favorite day of the week.
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  SPEAKER_00: Hayab and Wubdo were born in Ethiopia,
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  SPEAKER_00: conjoined at the top of their heads, facing opposite directions.
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  SPEAKER_00: The condition is called craniopagus.
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  SPEAKER_00: It shows up in roughly one out of every two and a half million births and fewer
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  SPEAKER_00: than 6% of conjoined twins have it.
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  SPEAKER_00: The girls arrived at SSM Health Cardinal Glennon Children's Hospital in St.
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  SPEAKER_00: Louis, just before their first birthday.
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  SPEAKER_00: They came through an international humanitarian partnership with the World Pediatric Project.
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  SPEAKER_00: The biological parents couldn't travel to the United States due
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  SPEAKER_00: to visa complications,
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  SPEAKER_00: so a team of caregivers took turns holding,
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  SPEAKER_00: rocking, and advocating for the girls around the clock.
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  SPEAKER_00: Doctors spent a year preparing for the twin separation across roughly six stage surgeries.
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  SPEAKER_00: Each stage slowly disentangled shared blood vessels
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  SPEAKER_00: and expanded skin tissue protecting blood flow to both brains.
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  SPEAKER_00: The final separation began the morning of February 24th and ran into the early hours
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  SPEAKER_00: of February 25th, a 24-hour operation.
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  SPEAKER_00: Dr. Joanna Kemp,
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  SPEAKER_00: a pediatric neurosurgeon at Cardinal Glennon and associate professor at St.
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  SPEAKER_00: Louis University, led the team.
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  SPEAKER_00: She became the first woman neurosurgeon in American history to complete
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  SPEAKER_00: a craniopagus twin separation.
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  SPEAKER_00: So it was kind of two rare things meeting each other, Kemp said.
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  SPEAKER_00: Six months later,
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  SPEAKER_00: the twins are recovering in two separate hospital beds for the first time
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  SPEAKER_00: in their lives.
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  SPEAKER_00: Wupto has already had a successful cranioplasty to rebuild her skull.
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  SPEAKER_00: HIOBS is scheduled for later this fall.
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  SPEAKER_00: In 2024,
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  SPEAKER_00: Joel LaPointe was scouting satellite maps for a campsite
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  SPEAKER_00: in Quebec's remote Côte-Nord region.
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  SPEAKER_00: He spotted an unusual circular depression near Lake Marshall.
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  SPEAKER_00: He was not a geologist.
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  SPEAKER_00: He reached out to researchers anyway in both Europe and North America.
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  SPEAKER_00: That inquiry Led to a team of French scientists to flag the site as
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  SPEAKER_00: a possible impact structure at a 2024 meeting of the Meteorical Society.
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  SPEAKER_00: The lead reached Gordon Ozynski,
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  SPEAKER_00: a planetary geologist at Western University who directs
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  SPEAKER_00: the Impact Earth Crater Database.
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  SPEAKER_00: Ozynski was skeptical at first, but joined an October 2025 expedition to the lake anyway.
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  SPEAKER_00: The team arrived by float plane and waded through 50 meters of water to reach shore,
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  SPEAKER_00: hauling their gear through swampy, bug-choked terrain.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's a telltale sign of a meteorite strike,
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  SPEAKER_00: not the volcanic feature the area had long assumed it to be.
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  SPEAKER_00: Wozinski called the shatter cones the only unmistakable naked eye evidence of
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  SPEAKER_00: a meteorite strike.
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  SPEAKER_00: Rock samples put the impact at roughly 390 million years ago.
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  SPEAKER_00: The crater spans 25 kilometers,
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  SPEAKER_00: making it the largest confirmed impact structure found since 2018.
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  SPEAKER_00: After consulting the Innu Council of Ekwanichit,
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  SPEAKER_00: whose territory includes the site,
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  SPEAKER_00: researchers named it Uwak LeFoy was thrilled when scientists confirmed his hunch.
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  SPEAKER_00: He now encourages other amateur observers to trust their instinct,
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  SPEAKER_00: even outside their own field of expertise.
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  SPEAKER_00: Sound doesn't fade smoothly at the smallest scale.
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  SPEAKER_00: It jumps.
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  SPEAKER_00: Physicists have theorized quantum jumps,
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  SPEAKER_00: sudden shifts between energy states, since the early 1900s.
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  SPEAKER_00: Scientists confirmed the phenomenon in trapped ions in 1986 and in photons,
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  SPEAKER_00: the particles of light, in 2007.
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  SPEAKER_00: Sound's turn had never come.
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  SPEAKER_00: A Stanford team,
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  SPEAKER_00: led by physicist Amir Safavi Naimi,
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  SPEAKER_00: has now caught it happening in real time,
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  SPEAKER_00: publishing the results in the journal Science.
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  SPEAKER_00: The researchers built a mechanical resonator,
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  SPEAKER_00: a microscopic structure that vibrates like a tuning fork.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's small enough that many could fit on a single computer chip.
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  SPEAKER_00: An ordinary tuning fork rings for hours.
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  SPEAKER_00: This one held its vibration for two milliseconds.
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  SPEAKER_00: That gave researchers time for hundreds of measurements.
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  SPEAKER_00: Each reading checked whether a phonon, the smallest possible unit of sound, was present or gone.
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  SPEAKER_00: The team could pinpoint the exact instant it dropped from one energy state to zero.
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  SPEAKER_00: Safavi Naini,
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  SPEAKER_00: an Associate Professor of Applied Physics,
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  SPEAKER_00: said the achievement clears a path toward new quantum technologies built
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  SPEAKER_00: on sound rather than light.
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  SPEAKER_00: Study co-authors Takuma Makihara and Eric Sezekiel spent months developing a way
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  SPEAKER_00: to pair the resonator with a superconducting quibbit.
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  SPEAKER_00: That quibbit acts as an electrical detector,
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  SPEAKER_00: reading the resonator's state without destroying it.
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  SPEAKER_00: The same platform could eventually help correct errors in quantum computers.
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  SPEAKER_00: It might also detect proteins inside living cells.
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  SPEAKER_00: Work Safavi Nayini's team is already pursuing with Caltech physicist Michael Rooks.
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  SPEAKER_00: Global renewable power capacity grew by record levels last year.
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  SPEAKER_00: The finding comes from a report by the International Renewable Energy Agency,
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  SPEAKER_00: published as world leaders gathered for the United Nations General Assembly.
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  SPEAKER_00: The world added 693 gigawatts of new renewable power in 2025,
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  SPEAKER_00: more than half the installed capacity of the entire United States.
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  SPEAKER_00: Simon Steele is Executive Secretary of UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
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  SPEAKER_00: Speaking at an Industry Acceleration Summit event,
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  SPEAKER_00: he said renewables saved humanity almost half a trillion dollars
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  SPEAKER_00: in avoided fossil fuel costs last year.
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  SPEAKER_00: That figure is larger than the combined economic output of more than three-quarters
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  SPEAKER_00: of the world's countries.
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  SPEAKER_00: The root power of market forces is taking hold, Steele said.
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  SPEAKER_00: Renewables were the cheapest source of new electricity in most markets in 2025,
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  SPEAKER_00: the report found.
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  SPEAKER_00: If growth holds at last year's pace,
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  SPEAKER_00: the world would reach 10.6 terawatts of renewable capacity by 2030.
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  SPEAKER_00: That falls just short of the 11.2 terawatt goal countries set at the 2023 COP28 climate talks.
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  SPEAKER_00: The gap has narrowed from the year before.
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  SPEAKER_00: Dave Waskow,
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  SPEAKER_00: director of the International Climate Initiative at the World Resources Institute,
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  SPEAKER_00: told Agence France-Presse, the good news comes with a caveat.
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  SPEAKER_00: Global energy demands keep rising,
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  SPEAKER_00: driven in part by cooling needs in a warming world and the growth of AI
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  SPEAKER_00: and data centers.
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  SPEAKER_00: Renewables still aren't displacing enough fossil fuels to keep pace.
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  SPEAKER_00: More than 166,000 Michigan students received a combined $672.5 million
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  SPEAKER_00: in state financial aid during the 2025-26 academic year.
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  SPEAKER_00: The figure comes from the State Department of Lifelong Education and Advancement
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  SPEAKER_00: and Potential, MILIAP.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's a 159.3% increase in the number of aided students compared with pre-pandemic levels.
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  SPEAKER_00: Total aid awarded has grown by more than $548 million over the same span.
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  SPEAKER_00: Early estimates suggest roughly 230,000 Michigan college students,
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  SPEAKER_00: more than half the state's total,
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  SPEAKER_00: were eligible for at least one state-funded scholarship in 2025-26.
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  SPEAKER_00: Miliap says that's the largest eligible pool since it began tracking the data.
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  SPEAKER_00: Dr. Beverly Walker-Grafia,
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  SPEAKER_00: Miliap's Executive Director said financial aid can be the difference between
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  SPEAKER_00: a student enrolling and putting their education on hold.
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  SPEAKER_00: Sarah Zurbicki is Deputy Director of the Department's Office of Higher Education.
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  SPEAKER_00: She said expanding access matters for the state's workforce as much as for individual students.
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  SPEAKER_00: Michigan's goal is to get 60% of working-age adults a degree or skill certificates by 2030.
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  SPEAKER_00: The state's programs include the Michigan Achievement Scholarship,
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  SPEAKER_00: the Community College Guarantee,
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  SPEAKER_00: Michigan Reconnect, and the Tuition Incentive Program.
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  SPEAKER_00: A recent study from the Michigan Center for Data
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  SPEAKER_00: and Analytics tracked Michigan Reconnect graduates.
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  SPEAKER_00: Their median wage rose more than $13,000 from before they enrolled.
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  SPEAKER_00: A year after graduation,
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  SPEAKER_00: they earned $16,500 more than similar workers with only a high school diploma.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's it for this edition of Sunday's Good News.
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  SPEAKER_00: I'm Rudy Martinez, and I will see you all again tomorrow.