Yeah, I know, I know. I’ve heard the jokes. “The good news in 2025? This is gonna be a really short broadcast!” But that’s only because the good news got drowned out by all the bad news.
We begin today with … plastics!
Compostable plastics
Plastic is made of petroleum. And when we throw it away, it breaks down into tiny particles that wind up in our bodies, our blood, and our brains.
So, where’s the good news? Material that may look like ordinary plastic, but this stuff is made from sugar cane, and it’s completely biodegradable. “It’s compostable plastic,” said Andrew Brousseau, who runs Black Earth Compost near Boston. “The key is that they break down, and they don’t leave microplastics in our soils.”
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At Black Earth Compost, these better plastics break down along with household food scraps to become valuable compost for farms and gardens.
The finished product? Compost – “Black gold” – that’s safe, with no microplastics in our brain.
Max Senechal is an executive at CJ Biomaterials in Woburn, Mass., one of several companies now making completely compostable plastics.
“The good news now in ’25 is that we’ve reached a point where we can produce these at large scale,” Senechal said.
Take for example a biodegradable plastic straw. Senechal said it “gives you all the functionality without the guilt!”
Disagreement
If we can all agree on anything, it’s that we can’t agree on anything.
“We certainly have gotten to a place where disagreement is mostly just corrosive,” said Northwestern University professor Eli Finkel. “We need to find a way to do it better.”
Finkel may have found it. He co-created the Center for Enlightened Disagreement at Northwestern University, one of several new projects to help us disagree better, such as running exercises that teach students how to disagree.
“In fact, the first program involved the use of improv techniques,” Finkel said. “For example, imagine that your job is to rant for one full minute about something that makes you very, very angry. My job is to take that information and present to everybody what it is that you value – not why you’re angry, not what you are opposed to, but what is underneath the anger that you feel.”
Does it work? “I feel very hopeful,” said Finkel. “The students are really leaning in to this idea that, to be a productive member of a multicultural society, we need to be able at least to listen and understand what the people who disagree with us believe.”
He said the goal is to apply this dynamic to the demographic at large: “If we can achieve here what it looks like we’re achieving, I think it won’t take us long before we’re able to spread this not only to other institutions of higher education, but to high schools and perhaps even beyond,” Finkel said.
Popup Wetlands
Everyone knows that birds fly South for the winter, and back again in the spring. But these are not nonstop flights; they need places along their long journeys to stop, eat, and sleep.
According to The Nature Conservancy’s Katie Riley, California has lost at least 90% of the lakes and marshes that were once layover spots, thanks to urban growth, modern agriculture, and climate change. Her team’s radical idea: Pay farmers to flood their fallow fields during migration times, creating “pop-up” wetlands.
Riley said, “Some birds, like the sandhill cranes we’re seeing out here today, use those flooded fields actually to sleep. Much smaller birds, they need flooded fields to be able to feed and access little bugs in the field.”
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I asked, “If you weren’t paying farmers to flood their fields here, what would happen to those birds that are trying to migrate?”
“They would not survive,” Riley replied. “We would see populations go down.”
This year, the farmers in the BirdReturns program are offering about 50,000 acres of bird rest stops.
Ben Leacox, general manager of Zuckerman Family Farms in Lodi, Calif., said not only do birds benefit from it, but farmers do, too: “This program may be the difference between me being in the black or the red this year,” he said. “This is a win-win transaction for everybody.”
AI and Med
You might not expect to find artificial intelligence on a “good-news” show. [🤷♂️] But in healthcare, AI is bringing enormous advances in predicting disease, discovering new drugs and, especially, diagnosing illnesses.
“It’s pretty darned good,” said Dr. Robert Wachter, chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. He’s also author of an upcoming book about artificial intelligence in medicine: “A Giant Leap: How AI Is Transforming Healthcare and What That Means for Our Future.”
He gave us a demonstration, by providing a patient’s symptoms to ChatGPT: “I have a 28-year-old patient, she’s lost a bunch of weight in the last six weeks. She’s kind of tremulous, she’s shaking. She’s pretty sweaty, and her stools are loose. Can you gimme a sense of what might be going on?”
ChatGPT replied: “Based on those symptoms, it sounds like she could be dealing with something like hyperthyroidism. Of course, you’d want to confirm that with some thyroid function tests.”
But we know that AI sometimes can make stuff up – what’s known as “AI hallucinations.” Isn’t that a risk? “It can be, and it’s something we worry about,” Wachter said. “And it’s why, at least for now, you don’t want this thing diagnosing by itself. We talk about the doctor in the loop.
“It’s getting better every year, and I think this was the year that we turned a corner, where this is going to be something of a golden era in medicine over the next five or ten years,” he said.
Wrap
Well, I’m afraid that’s all the time we have. We won’t have time to mention how U.S. homicides dropped almost 20 percent this year …
Or how Paris cleaned up the Seine River so completely that people are now swimming in it for the first time in 100 years …
Or how a British charity cleared 300,000 land mines left over from a civil war in Sri Lanka, foot by foot. It took 16 years, but now 280,000 people have returned safely home …
Or how four old dams on the Klamath River in California and Oregon had cut off salmon from their traditional spawning grounds for over 100 years – but once the old dams were removed last year, the salmon returned within days. Somehow, they remembered!
Have a joyous New Year, and remember: Bad news breaks suddenly, but good news happens everywhere, all the time. Good morning, everyone!
For more info:
- Black Earth Compost
- CJ Biomaterials
- The Litowitz Center for Enlightened Disagreement, Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill.
- The Nature Conservancy
- BirdReturns
- Robert Wachter, professor and chair, Department of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco
- “A Giant Leap: How AI Is Transforming Healthcare and What That Means for Our Future” by Robert Wachter, M.D. (Portfolio), in Hardcover, eBook and Audio formats, available Feb. 3, 2026 via Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.org