Great News Day: October 25, 2026

Good morning. Today is Sunday, October 25, 2026. A teenager in Louisiana just walked out of a decade of hospital stays. Mountain lions are once again raising kittens in Minnesota. And a 15 year old mRNA breakthrough is quietly rewriting what cancer recurrence looks like. Pour your coffee. This is a good one.

🌱 Today's Mindset

The small return

Here is something most of us learn the hard way. Good things rarely come back the way they left.

They do not announce themselves. They do not arrive in the exact shape of the loss. The grief ends on its own schedule, not when you decide you are ready. The friend reaches out again on a random Tuesday, not on the anniversary you were quietly dreading. The health comes back one morning when you notice you got out of bed without thinking about it.

Most of what returns to us returns small, and sideways, and a little bit later than we would have asked.

This is worth remembering because the alternative is to stop watching. If joy only counts when it arrives with a brass band, you'll miss most of it. The brass band is rare. The quiet re-entry is constant.

In today's issue a teenager walks home after more than 100 hospital stays. A female mountain lion no one planned for finds her way to the North Woods and starts a family. A tiger raises her ninth cub. None of these stories had the ending anyone would have promised at the start. Each one came back smaller and more improbable and more wonderful than the hope that preceded it.

So keep watching. Keep your attention loose and open. The thing you've been waiting for may already be on its way, taking the scenic route, intending to arrive on a day you weren't paying attention.

The good you've been waiting for is already circling back. Today you'll recognize it.

⭐ Today's Bright Lead

After more than 100 hospital stays, Phillip is free.

Phillip Mullin at Friday's ceremony in New Orleans. Photo: WVUE Fox 8 / Gabby Killett.

Phillip Mullin is 15 years old. He loves Legos, Spider-Man, and his little sister Paige. Over the course of his life, sickle cell disease put him in the hospital more than 100 times. On Friday, in New Orleans, his family and his medical team gathered at Manning Family Children's Hospital to mark something that had never happened in Louisiana before. Phillip is the first child in the state to be functionally cured of sickle cell disease, through a one time stem cell gene therapy called Lyfgenia.

His speech, by every account, brought the room to tears. He talked about sacrifice and about what you can carry out of a long struggle. "If you can endure that pain and walk away from it," he said, "you find that you now have a heart strong enough to overcome any obstacle." He thanked his sister. He called her the greatest gift he had ever been given.

Then he said what he wanted next. He wants every patient with sickle cell to get access to this treatment. And he is going back to school, so he can become the kind of doctor who can sit across from a child with sickle cell and say, honestly, I know.

For now, he said, he is going home. He is going to sleep in his own bed, and build Legos with Paige.

Read the full story at WVUE Fox 8 →

🌍 More Good Today

🇺🇸 For the first time in a century, Minnesota has mountain lion kittens.

A wolf researcher in northern Minnesota set up a trail camera over a buried deer, half expecting nothing. What he got instead was video of a female cougar coming back to her kill, with three kittens trailing at her heels. DNA tests showed the mother likely traveled from northwestern Nebraska and the father came from the Black Hills of South Dakota, each crossing hundreds of miles of inhospitable country before finding each other in Minnesota. Cougars were killed off in the state by design more than a hundred years ago. These kittens are the first known to have been born there since. "This union is remarkable," one puma expert told the Star Tribune. "Not only did they beat the odds, but they found each other and produced a successful litter." Read more at the Star Tribune.

🇹🇭 Meet Mae Kaew, mother of nine and now a grandmother.

In Thailand's Huai Kha Khaeng Wildlife Sanctuary, a female tiger named Mae Kaew has, over three litters, raised nine cubs. One of her daughters has now had cubs of her own, caught strolling past a camera trap in the forest. Thailand is the only country in Southeast Asia where the wild tiger population is rising, with the Royal Thai Government this year estimating 210 to 257 tigers across 26 of 30 protected areas surveyed. The approach behind the comeback is quieter than most. Rangers patrol with a tool called SMART, wildlife workers run a conservation music program called the Big Cat Band, and kindergartens near Khlong Lan National Park now have a Tiger Science classroom. Save the forest, feed the deer, teach the children, and the tigers come back. Read more.

🇮🇱 🌍 Thirty years, 9,000 children, one working heart at a time.

This week in Jerusalem, the Israeli humanitarian organization Save a Child's Heart marked its 30th anniversary. In three decades it has provided cardiac surgery and catheterization procedures to more than 9,000 children from 75 countries, at no cost to their families. Of those children, 4,732 came from 39 African nations. The organization has also trained more than 180 doctors and nurses from those countries, so the care can keep spreading. Children who were once sent home to die from treatable heart defects now grow up to become engineers, teachers, parents. Israeli President Isaac Herzog this week backed calls for the group to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Whether the medal comes or not, 9,000 beating hearts is already the answer. Read more.

🔬 Science of Joy

A personalized mRNA cancer vaccine just cut melanoma recurrence by 42 percent.

Here is the number that stopped oncologists mid sentence this week. Forty two.

Merck and Moderna released the long awaited results of a Phase 3 clinical trial on their personalized melanoma vaccine, intismeran. The trial followed 1,137 people who had surgery for high risk melanoma, the most aggressive form of skin cancer. Everyone got the standard immunotherapy drug, pembrolizumab. About two thirds also received a vaccine that had been custom made from their own tumor cells, using the same mRNA technology that powered the COVID vaccines.

After about two years of follow up, the group that got the vaccine had a 42 percent lower risk of their cancer returning or of dying from it. The risk of the cancer spreading to other parts of the body dropped 38 percent. Side effects were mild.

Oncologists call a 10 percent risk reduction substantial. One researcher in Brisbane said a reduction above 40 percent "would send many researchers over the Moon." Trial participant Ted Komenda, 56, got 17 doses of the vaccine two years ago after his skin cancer recurred. He has had no recurrence since, and he was happy to tell NPR about it on his drive to a paint sales job on Cape Cod. Merck and Moderna say they will now seek FDA approval, with similar vaccines in trials for kidney, lung, bladder, and pancreatic cancers.

Translation: the body's own immune system, taught by a shot to recognize a specific tumor, really can learn. The next few years are going to be remarkable.

Read the full write up at Nature.

💛 Bright Find

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✨ One More Smile

A child in Riverside, Ohio dropped a stuffed cat into a storm drain on the way to school this week. The child's mother called the city. Kevin Miller, who works for Riverside Public Works, drove over, pulled the drain cover, took out a reacher, and fished the stuffed cat back into the light. The mother took photos. The city posted them.

"It may seem like a small act of kindness," the city wrote, "but to a child, that stuffed animal means the world. Thank you, Kevin, for showing that heroes don't always wear capes. Sometimes they wear a City of Riverside employee badge."

Somewhere in Ohio today, a very loved stuffed cat is being hugged a little harder than usual. That counts.

That's today. Thank you for reading. The world is still good, and so are you.

See you tomorrow,
The Great News Day team

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