Welcome back to our weekly behind-the-scenes glimpse at what’s getting our team talking. Tell us what you’ve been reading at info@reasonstobecheerful.world and we just might feature it here. Hands off the tentacles California and Washington have banned octopus farms. Seven other states are trying to do the same, as are countries like Chile and Spain. But there’s a twist: Octopus farms don’t exist. Not yet, anyway. Spanish seafood company Nueva Pescanova has plans to build the world’s first large-scale octopus farm, a notion that has many environmental activists alarmed. The octopus isn’t built for captivity. They require lots of stimulus, their urine contains high concentrations of toxic ammonia, and when trapped with their peers they’ve been known to turn cannibal. For these reasons, a movement to ban octopus farms before they even appear is beginning to emerge, according to a story in Vox shared by Contributing Editor Geetanjali Krishna. Geetanjali says: This is a really cool story about, as the author says, “a solution in search of a problem.” Really like the idea of such proactive solutions, which can start debates before the problem actually sets in! Building a better storm drain Prospect Park is a giant emerald jewel smack in the middle of Brooklyn, providing acres and acres of green space for humans and wildlife alike. It’s also a massive sponge that mitigates flooding during the city’s increasingly frequent extreme downpours. Now, New York wants to do even more to leverage the park’s absorbent abilities. According to a story in Gothamist shared by Executive Editor Will Doig, a $68 million investment announced last week would create new ponds and rain gardens across the park. These green infrastructure enhancements would drain more runoff from the surrounding neighborhoods and protect the park itself from being inundated. (Two years ago, the Prospect Park Zoo found itself under 25 feet of water from a tropical storm.) “Our public parks are more than just beautiful places to take in the scenery — they are also natural infrastructure making our city more resilient,” said NYC Parks Commissioner Iris Rodriguez-Rosa. Will says: I used to live in one of these Brooklyn neighborhoods and never thought of nearby Prospect Park as a stormwater sponge. So great that this beautiful recreational space will double as an important piece of green infrastructure. What else we’re reading  Uruguay’s Renewable Charge: A Small Nation, a Big Lesson for the World — shared by Founder David Byrne from Forbes What Happens When a City Takes Women’s Unpaid Work Seriously? (subscription required) — shared by Interim Editorial Director Tess Riley from Grist  Mushrooms Could Help Address NH Chemical Contamination Problem — shared by Contributing Editor Geetanjali Krishna from Valley News  Illinois Families Are Going Electric — for Free — shared by Interim Editorial Director Tess Riley from Grist In other news… So far 91 people have contributed to our year-end membership drive. Amazing! If you value this rare form of nonprofit journalism, please join our community and support us. Every membership is pay-what-you-wish. The post What We’re Reading: A Movement to Ban Something That Doesn’t Exist appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.

For just about as long as we as a species have believed in spirits and the afterlife, there have been those of us who have wanted to punch through the veil that divides us and communicate with the other side. There have been many methods for doing this, from seances to Ouija boards, to more modern devices such as EVP recordings and "spirit boxes," but some of the more bizarre are those cases of mad inventors trying to craft machines and other contraptions that would allow us to commune with spirits and even let them come tumbling into our world. 

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You might think you’re just lazy when you procrastinate, paranoid when you double-check your front door, or a little weird for talking about your coworkers behind their backs. But what if these “bad habits” are actually your brain’s way of keeping you alive? Beneath the layers of modern convenience, many everyday actions—nervous tics, obsessive checks, […] The post 10 Everyday Human Behaviors That Are Actually Survival Instincts appeared first on Listverse.

The marble head of a kore, a type of free-standing statue from the Greek Archaic period (800-480 B.C.) depicting a young female figure, has been discovered in the ancient Etruscan city of Vulci, central Italy. The head of the female statue is one of only a handful of known large-scale Greek Archaic statues ever discovered outside of Greece. The kore head was found in an excavation of the area of a monumental temple discovered in 2021 as part of the ongoing Vulci Cityscape project. The sculpture depicts a young woman with almond-shaped eyes and a serene smile known as an “archaic smile” intended to convey a sense of ideal harmony and well-being rather than happiness. Her hair is elaborately curled and braided. It is attributed to an Attic workshop of the early 5th century B.C. “The discovery of the late Archaic marble head of Kore at Vulci is an event of extraordinary significance both for its artistic value and for the implications it carries. It was not simply a prestigious votive gift that was found, but a concrete testimony to the spiritual and therefore politico-civil ties that united Etruria and the Greek world. This is an archaeological discovery that can change our perception of the world as would happen with a new scientific law. It reshapes our representation of reality cognitively, symbolically and also politically,” said Minister Alessandro Giuli. “It is no coincidence that this happens in Vulci, a city open to contact through its port, recently acquired by the Ministry of Culture, and through the hinterland where already from the Orientalizing period, from the end of the 8th century B.C., all the objects, but above all the rituals, now reconstructible thanks to new diagnostic tools for archaeology, confirm to us a dynamism, a cultural permeability that still today must represent and represent our models.” The head is currently at the Central Institute for Restoration (ICR) in Rome, where it is being cleaned and conserved. It will be thoroughly analyzed to investigate the traces of original polychromy that survive on the marble surface, what materials and techniques were used to create the piece.

A teenager holds a mobile phone displaying a message from social media platform Instagram after the account was locked for age verification in Sydney, Australia, on Dec. 9, 2025. AFP via Getty ImagesA…

Community members gather for a public hearing as the Minneapolis City Council considers strengthening an ordinance barring cooperation with ICE, in Minneapolis on Dec. 9, 2025. Jenn Ackerman for The Epoch…