Environment

A ground-up seed just pulled 98% of microplastics out of water

A low-tech answer to a very modern problem.

Microplastics in your drinking water is the kind of problem you hear about, briefly process, then toss in the too-scary-to-think-about file. Except, a new study in ACS Omega just pulled it back out.

In this piece by Mark Wales, we get to know Moringa oleifera, the tropical tree locals have called the "miracle tree" for centuries. Based on the new research, the nickname might have been selling it short.

Grind up the seeds. Mix them with a salt solution. What you get acts like a natural magnet for impurities, pulling 98% of microplastics straight out of water. The plant-based method outperformed the industry-standard chemical across a wider range of conditions, at lower cost and lower energy. Which leaves one obvious question: what's the catch?

Do you have a GOOD picture to share?

Send us your best images, and we may feature them as the image of the day. Be sure to tell us a bit about your pic.

Health

Your body is sitting on a miracle drug and refuses to self-prescribe

Belief works like a drug, but you can't prescribe it to yourself.

My wife is a beautiful woman. When I tell her she looks great on any given evening, she shrugs it off. Then a friend swings by, says the exact same thing, and she lights right up. "Thank you so much!" Hey! What gives?

Turns out, sometimes the messenger is as important as the message. And your body operates on the same principle, often to infuriating effect. Roughly a third of people with irritable bowel syndrome improve on placebo treatments alone. Sugar pills. Nothing pills. They work, but for some reason only when someone in a white coat hands them over.

That quietly maddening fact is where evolutionary biologist Phil Starks begins. Placebo injections measurably boost dopamine in Parkinson's patients. Fake knee surgeries relieve pain almost as well as real ones. Open-label placebos, where doctors literally tell patients "this is a sugar pill," still work.

The body isn't being fooled. It's being given permission. Which raises a harder question: why can't you give it to yourself?

What did we learn?

Yesterday, we shared a story about a Texan woman who moved to England and has been sending dispatches back from her new home.

Would GOOD readers ever move to another country? Almost 40% of you have one foot out the door, but almost as many have discovered the best part of traveling abroad is coming home again.

• I have one foot out the door already! (38.2%)

• Never. I wouldn't even leave my state. (16.7%)

• I go whenever I can, but home always wins. (36.3%)

• I've already done it and I don't look back. (8.8%)

Culture

Shakespeare would have flunked your English class

A linguist explains why that's actually fine.

I studied writing in college (go Bruins!), and sometimes the rules I learned then feel as outdated as the cursive I learned in elementary school. It's literally, like, drivin' me crazy.

In her new book "Why We Talk Funny," linguistics professor Valerie M. Fridland says that, difficult as it might be, I should relax. The things grammar sticklers point to as proof that English is falling apart are mostly just the latest leg of a very long relay. The "t" in "often"? Dropped centuries before you were born. Ending a sentence with a preposition? A rule one 18th-century grammarian floated casually, and the rest of us promoted it to law. The apostrophe in droppin'? A 19th-century sneer made permanent.

Even Shakespeare was writing in the middle of a shift that earlier Londoners would have found appalling. And if "thou art" strikes you as the gold standard of proper English, Fridland closes the piece with a line designed to ruin your whole week.

On April 22, 1885, the state of Nebraska gave itself a birthday present. Thirteen years earlier, a cranky newspaper editor named J. Sterling Morton had looked out at his adopted home state, noted the total absence of shade, and proposed an official day for planting trees. Nebraskans agreed, and on that first Arbor Day in 1872, they put roughly one million saplings in the ground. By 1885, the holiday was such a hit that the state legislature made it an official holiday and permanently relocated it to April 22, which just so happened to be Morton's birthday. He was 53, still editing, still evangelizing for trees, and presumably delighted.

For the next 85 years, April 22 was quietly America's unofficial day for loving a tree. Then, in 1970, Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson picked the exact same date for the very first Earth Day. Nelson, for the record, was not trying to be cute. He picked April 22 because it fell between spring break and finals, and he wanted college students awake for it. The Arbor Day overlap was pure cosmic accident. Twenty million Americans showed up, making it the largest single-day protest in U.S. history.

The ripple effects landed fast. Within three years, Congress had birthed the EPA, muscled up the Clean Air Act, and passed the Endangered Species Act. Morton's one good idea about shade, quietly and on his own birthday, had grown into a forest.

Do you have something GOOD to share?

We’re always on the lookout for uplifting, enlightening, and engaging content to share with readers like you. If you have something you think should be featured in the Daily GOOD, let me know!

💬 From the group text…

If you’re going to get swim instructions, there’s no better teacher than this.

Join the Group Text! Send us your social media gold.