Local News

Hot dogs, a microchip, and the mystery that led one dog home

Eleven years is a long time to keep the faith.

I've written stories about lottery winners, health miracles, and found gold... but I don't think I've ever been quite as jealous of a story as I am of this one. In 2015, a Philadelphia woman named Jourdyn Koziak lost her pit bull, Forty-Cal, from her backyard. Probably stolen. Gone. She moved counties, built a whole new chapter of her life, and still, every single year, kept his microchip information up to date. Just in case.

Last week, a little girl found a friendly pit bull walking up to her on a street in Philly. Her family fed him hot dogs and called Animal Control. The shelter scanned his chip, found Koziak's number, and made a call she almost didn't believe. When she finally showed up, the staff pulled her aside and gently warned her: after eleven years, he might not recognize her. As Erik Barnes reports, they were wrong about that.

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Science

The math that quietly runs the world is weirder than advertised

We built modern science on concepts that still confuse everyone.

Odds are, you don't really understand probability. That's not a dig: engineering professor Zachary del Rosario opens with a quote from Bertrand Russell that probability is "the most important concept in modern science" and also something nobody has the slightest notion what it means. Reassuring!

Here's something that will mess with you: a fair coin isn't actually fair. If you start a flip with heads facing up, physics says it lands heads up slightly more often. To get a truly random result, you'd first need to randomly choose the starting face. But… how do you do that in a truly random way?

The stakes get higher fast. Every time a chatbot finishes your sentence, it's running a probability calculation, and since probability describes randomness, you'll get a different answer every time you ask the same question. Password security, clinical drug trials, the AI writing your emails: all of it runs on coin flips, on purpose. The fact that it’s hard to predict is actually why it works.

What did we learn?

In Monday’s issue of the Daily GOOD, we shared new smart glasses designed to help people with dementia live better lives. I think we’re all on board with that! But, how do GOOD readers feel about the creep of cameras in our lives in general? In general, you are not fans. Almost two-thirds of you think the creep is getting to be a bit much.

• More cameras, more accountability. I love it. (9.1%)

• I think they're fun, in moderation, like everything. (10.2%)

• I get the upside, but the surveillance creep is real. (64.8%)

• Hard pass. This is dystopia with better branding. (15.9%)

Health

The only craving Ozempic was supposed to kill was the one for seconds

A study of 600,000 veterans suggests these drugs may quiet cravings nobody asked them to.

The only thing most people expect to quit when they go on a GLP-1 is the disappointing ritual of stepping on the bathroom scale. But after starting one of the popular weight-control drugs, one of physician-scientist Ziyad Al-Aly's patients quit something nobody expected: a two-pack-a-day habit he'd been trying to shake for over a decade. He didn't use a patch. Didn't set a quit date. The cigarettes just lost their pull.

Then another patient told Al-Aly that alcohol had stopped calling. Then another. Then another.

Al-Aly decided to stop filing these stories away as flukes. He and his team pulled the health records of more than 600,000 veterans and ran the kind of rigorous analysis that turns anecdotes into evidence. What came back was striking enough to make addiction specialists pay attention: 50% fewer deaths from substance use. 39% fewer overdoses. Meaningfully lower rates of new addiction developing across alcohol, opioids, cocaine, nicotine, and cannabis.

The drugs aren't approved for addiction. There are real questions still unanswered. But the most promising lead in addiction medicine in decades may have arrived not through a deliberate search, but through millions of people just trying to lose a little weight.

On March 31, 1966, the Soviet Union launched Luna 10, an unassuming silver sphere about the size of a washing machine, and quietly made history. Sixty years ago today, it became the first human-made object to achieve orbit around the Moon, circling our nearest neighbor 460 times over the next two months and beaming back data on radiation, magnetic fields, and the lunar gravitational field. At the time, the Soviets were so proud they broadcast its signal live at a Communist Party Congress in Moscow, where delegates reportedly gave it a standing ovation.

What made Luna 10 more than a Cold War trophy was the science. The gravitational anomalies it detected, lumpy uneven patches of stronger pull called "mascons," turned out to be critical. Engineers planning the Apollo missions had to account for them precisely, or capsules could drift off course. Luna 10's data quietly helped put humans on the Moon just three years later.

Now, six decades on, the Moon is calling again. As you read this, the Artemis II countdown clock is ticking at Kennedy Space Center, with four astronauts, Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen, targeting a 6:24 PM EDT launch tomorrow, April 1. They'll fly farther from Earth than any human since Apollo 17 in 1972. Luna 10 opened the door. Tomorrow, we walk back through it.

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