Science

The next leather jacket you buy might start its life as a mushroom

Oh mycelium, that jacket is to die for!

Ever since I was a young, picky eater, I’ve had a love-hate relationship with mushrooms. I love to hate them. Personally, there’s no room for shrooms in my diet. In my wardrobe, though? As Mark Wales reports, that’s starting to sound surprisingly plausible.

Scientists in Austria are growing leather-like fabric from mycelium, the root-like structure of mushrooms. In the right conditions, it forms a dense mat that can be turned into a flexible, durable textile that looks and feels a lot like traditional leather.

The pitch is pretty compelling. The new material grows in days, uses far less water than cattle, and can even be biodegradable. Which raises a strange but increasingly real question for fashion: are people ready to wear fungus?

Forgive me, dear readers, I worked hard to work a fungi/fun-guy joke into this story and couldn’t make it work.

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What did we learn yesterday?

Yesterday, we awoke the great debate about sleep and the snooze button.

What sort of relationship do GOOD readers have with the snooze button? Almost half of you don’t hit that snooze button at all. I am not one of you!

• We've never met. The alarm goes off, I get up. Simple. (47.7%)

• The first three times don't count, right? (21.1%)

• I hit it once, on principle, then it's on with the day. (24.8%)

• I don’t snooze. My partner does. Send help. (6.4%)

Among the reader responses, Alda Visusmc shared their superpower. “Don’t have to set an alarm. I have an internal alarm that works great. When I go to bed I tell myself when I have to be up. Then I wake up 5 minutes before that time.” Alda, I’m very, very jealous!

Culture

A brutal tamale review goes viral, the follow-up is the real masterpiece

A little corn-fusion. A lot of internet joy.

OK, I’m going full pun mode. This story is corny, and I’m not apologizing.

In this story by Mark Wales, a customer named “Rebecca O.” drops a brutal one-star review after an “absolutely awful” tamale experience. Apparently, she found her meal to be utterly terrible. And there’s a kernel of truth to her review: if you don’t know you’re supposed to unwrap the tamale from the husk, you are going to have a bad time. One star for sure. The same could probably be said about an unpeeled banana.

Then “Rebecca” posts a follow-up review that changes everything, and the internet does what it does best: dogpiles… lovingly. Suddenly, everyone is sharing their own first-tamale mistakes, and a Phoenix restaurant owner is sitting on a husk-powered viral win.

But why do I keep putting “Rebecca” in quotes? There’s another twist to this tasty story.

Health

Tiny brow movements signal meaning around the world

Eyebrows might be the most universal language humans have.

If I told you this new research might raise an eyebrow, you’d know exactly what I meant. And according to that research, it wouldn’t matter what language you spoke, you’d still get the idea.

As Erik Barnes reports, a 2025 study from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics suggests brows clarify communication across cultures, ages, and languages*. They even help repair conversations on the fly. When listeners furrow their eyebrows, it can signal they’re lost. When the speaker clarifies, the brows relax. Message received.

As psychologist Dane Archer told the Los Angeles Times, people tend to mask their emotions with their mouth, not their eyes and brows.

* - My wife would tell you that eyebrows are there so wives can delight in painfully plucking them from their husbands' heads when they get too wiry.

On March 3, 1887, Anne Sullivan arrived at Ivy Green in Tuscumbia, Alabama to meet Helen Keller, the young girl who was both deaf and blind, and whom nobody had been able to help. Their meeting was arranged through what we might today call a game of telephone that started, fittingly, with Alexander Graham Bell. Bell, who Helen’s parents had contacted for help, reached out to Michael Anagnos, the director of the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston, and Anagnos, eager to test whether a deafblind child could be taught language, sent his gifted young graduate Sullivan south. Within weeks, the famous water-pump lesson clicked: “water” wasn’t just a sensation, it was a word, and suddenly everything could have a name.

Sullivan’s genius wasn’t a single miracle moment; it was a daily, stubborn method: finger-spelling, structure, and constant connection between words and real experience. Keller rocketed from objects to books to public speaking, eventually graduating from Radcliffe and becoming living proof that deafblind education could reach the highest academic levels. But the path wasn’t smooth: Keller’s childhood story “The Frost King” triggered plagiarism accusations, a bruising scandal that ruptured their relationship with Anagnos and taught them how quickly outsiders could doubt a disabled person’s authorship, or even her mind.

Fame and advocacy didn’t always pay as well as they’d hoped, and at one point Anne and Helen were forced to perform on the vaudeville circuit to get by, turning public curiosity into rent money. As Sullivan’s health declined, Polly Thomson joined them and became an essential third partner; there was even a near-elopement with Peter Fagan that Helen’s family shut down.

Keller kept lecturing, writing, and organizing for disability rights and access long after “Teacher” was gone, and when Helen died in 1968, she left a world permanently changed in how disabled people were educated, employed, and listened to.

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