In today’s Good News, a town in Texas is being equipped with enough lifesaving automated external defibrillators to give every resident a fighting chance at surviving cardiac arrest. And in the Galapagos, giant tortoises are once again living on Floreana Island, playing a key role in conservationist efforts to restore damaged land.

Catherine Garcia
The Week Digital

Nobel laureate and chemist Omar Yaghi has developed a device that pulls clean drinking water out of the air, even in the driest conditions. The unit uses ultra-low-grade thermal energy to operate and could produce up to 264 gallons of water every day, a lifesaver in desert communities and islands prone to hurricanes. The invention is a “science capable of reimagining matter,” Yaghi told The Guardian, and he hopes further climate-friendly inventions will give the next generation a “planet worthy of their hopes.”

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Cardiac arrest survival rates jumped from 10% to 47% in McKinney, Texas, after automated external defibrillators (AEDs) were placed in all police vehicles and neighborhoods across the city. The McKinney Fire Department launched the initiative two years ago, basing it on a similar program in Seattle. The goal is to ensure that an AED is “never more than four minutes away from any cardiac event,” said Good News Network. In the last year, the AEDs have helped quickly revive nine McKinney residents.

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Giant tortoises are roaming around Floreana Island in the Galapagos archipelago for the first time in nearly two centuries. Earlier this month, dozens of juvenile hybrid tortoises were released into the wild on the island, more than 175 years after their ancestors went extinct due to human interference and invasive species like rats. These new residents will turn back “generations of destruction,” said National Geographic, and “shape the ecosystem from the ground up” by “dispersing seeds and cutting paths.”

The planting of 66 billion trees in a ring around China’s Taklamakan Desert has turned this harsh area into a carbon sink that pulls CO2 out of the atmosphere. When the project began in 1978, the plan was for the trees to keep sand from ruining adjacent grasslands. By the time the final trees were planted in 2024, the “Great Green Wall” had helped “raise average rainfall by several millimeters,” promoting foliage growth and “greater degrees” of carbon sequestration, said Good News Network.

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