Episode Description: An oncologist cried at her desk when she read these latest trial results. Researchers put exercise wheels in empty fields and sand dunes, and wild mice found them and ran, unprompted, for no reward. A new drug just cleared hepatitis B from the body entirely for one in five patients. Not suppressed. Cleared. Arielle and Karissa also get into a 55-year study proving that banning toxic forever chemicals actually works, the surprising reason zebra striping cuts hangovers, and why Sweden’s new screen time guidelines are aimed at parents, not kids. If you have questions, comments, feedback, suggestions, or just want to say hi, send a message to: podcast@optimistdaily.com. Want to be part of the Optimism Movement? Become an Emissary. Subscribe to our FREE Daily/Weekly Newsletter and follow us on Instagram, X, and Blue Sky. The Optimist Daily is a project of the World Business Academy. Donate link: https://www.optimistdaily.com/donate-to-support-the-optimist-daily/?gift=Y%20http:// Theme and all original music by Marvin Lanes Transcript: Arielle:  Hey, it’s Arielle Karissa:  And I’m Karissa Arielle:  And welcome back to The Optimist Daily’s weekly roundup Karissa:  Yeah, we’re super excited to be here, sharing all the solutions from The Optimist Daily! Arielle:  And on that note, we have a daily newsletter that’s free for everyone, but we also have just debuted our weekly newsletter, so you can get all 10 solutions from the week in one place on Fridays. Karissa:  Yeah, and if you want your solutions on your social media platforms, whether that be Facebook, Threads, Blue Sky, we’re on everything @OptimistDaily, except on X where we’re @OdeToOptimism Arielle:  You can also reach us if you have any comments, questions, or feedback, or just wanna say hi at our email, which is podcast@optimistdaily.com Karissa:  Yeah. Thank you once again for being an optimist and supporting our mission here. We, of course, wanna send a big shout-out to our Emissaries who are our financial supporters at The Optimist Daily. As an Emissary, you have the perk of being able to shout out someone, something that makes you optimistic. And we have a shout-out today from Patricia that we are going to share with everybody at the end of the podcast . So stay tuned for that. Arielle:  With all of that said and done, how are you doing, Karissa? Karissa:  I’m doing okay. I mean, still dealing with allergies even though it’s summer now. Arielle:  Yeah, the allergy season has been rough. Karissa:  Yeah, it has been pretty rough. But what about you? How are things over in Amsterdam? Arielle:  I’m doing well. Still kind of settling into my routine after being back from my workcation. So nothing to complain about, but, uh, yeah, it’s always kind of, kind of weird to get back into the flow of your regular life. Karissa:  Yeah, exactly. Arielle:  But yeah, overall nothing to complain about Karissa:  Nothing to complain about at all, and I’m certainly not complaining about the solutions that we had to share this week. Arielle:  There were some really cool ones, and we’re gonna get into them right now. Karissa:  Yeah. Arielle:  So the first solution is titled, “A New Drug Just Cleared Hepatitis B in One in Five Patients.” So this new drug just achieved something the standard treatment couldn’t manage in a whole decade. It actually cleared hepatitis B from the body, not suppressed it, but cleared it for about one in five patients. The disease affects 240 million people worldwide, and but most of them don’t even know they have it. The virus can silently damage the liver for years with absolutely no symptoms. The standard treatment suppresses the virus, but it really doesn’t clear it out of the, the body. and The functional cure rate was around 3%, and that was only after eight to 10 years of consistent treatment. This article goes into the new treatment that’s been, really successful considering that uh, this treatment achieves 19% functional cure. Karissa:  This is a huge breakthrough, and I was really happy to see this. Exciting that there’s actually now a treatment perhaps that can be distributed around the world. Arielle:  The second solution is titled “Nine Clever Ways to Give Your Old Sponges a Second Life.” Most of us toss a sponge the moment it looks past its kitchen prime. It turns out old sponges have a whole second career ahead of them in the garden, in the bathroom, in the freezer. So this is a solution that’s genuinely useful in our day-to-day lives. I will admit I just threw a sponge out today, and I probably should have checked this article out before I, I did that.  There were a couple really surprising ones, in this list. So one of them was the seed starting tray, which I never would’ve thought of, but it makes so much sense. You can just wet the sponge and spread seeds across the top and cover it with a clear bowl and just mist every few days and then the seeds will sprout. And then another one that I liked was the reusable ice pack, which, uh, you obviously I would clean the sponge really, thoroughly first. But then yeah, you can just soak it in water, seal it in a, in a Ziploc or something, and then throw it in the freezer. Karissa:  Yeah. So many great ideas here. I really liked the pest repellent pad idea where you can just, soak it in insect repellent or citronella oil and leave it outdoors, because right now in the summer it’s major mosquito Arielle:  Mm-hmm. Karissa:  And pest, uh, season, so that was a good idea. Arielle:  The third solution is called “How PFAS Regulation Cut Toxic Chemical Levels in Canadian Wildlife.” We’re all familiar with forever chemicals and why they carry that name, ’cause they last forever. PFAS don’t break down in nature or in our bodies, but a 55-year study of seabird eggs in Canada just found something surprising. When governments actually banned the worst PFAS, the levels dropped sharply. So it’s proof that bans like this can work. This 55-year study tracked PFAS in northern gannet eggs on Bonaventure Island, which is in the Saint Lawrence Seaway basin. And it’s such a long study that it captures the full arc from the buildup through peak and then back down. Gannets on the St. Lawrence were especially exposed. That seaway collects runoff from manufacturing centers across the Great Lakes region. But the PFOA is down about 40% overall, which is amazing news. But the article also mentions that it has edged back up recently, so just an example of how progress isn’t always linear. But overall, this is great news. Karissa:  Yeah, progress is progress. Arielle:  Hmm. And I think it’s just, it’s really easy to feel quite nihilistic about the environment, like thinking that we’re too far gone, and it’s all just, you know, doom and gloom. But studies like this and results like this are proof that regulation works when it’s very clear and enforced. The fourth solution is why immersive reading is taking over BookTok in 2026. TikTok searches for immersive reading went up nearly 10 times in early 2026. The technique is reading a physical book while listening to the audiobook at the same time, and it’s going viral as a fix for not being able to focus. When I saw this title, Karissa, I thought of you because you said you’ve been saying that you, like, have a hard time focusing on reading. Karissa:  Yeah. This is something that I’ve, especially when I was in college and an audiobook was available for a certain, like, novel we were reading or something, I would do this ’cause I really, for school purposes, needed to know everything that was going on in the book and really wanted to be immersed. But to see that this is actually a valid technique and can help you just really tune into the story is very exciting. Arielle:  Yeah, I think the mechanism of it is pretty interesting. When your eyes and ears are on the same text, then there’s no gap for your phone or your mental to-do list to slip in. Um, I am pretty good at focusing on what I’m reading if I’m already really into it, but I do notice these days that if I’m just starting an article or if I’m just getting into the first pages of a book, it, it’s not infrequent that I’ll check my phone or, yeah, just get distracted by something. Karissa:  Mm-hmm. Arielle:  I think, even just to get things going, it’s a useful tool. But there is a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA named Maryanne Wolf, and she distinguishes immersive reading from deep reading. She argues the friction of reading text on a page builds critical thinking, empathy, and the ability to sit with difficulty. So she’s concerned that the audio, even paired with print, may reduce some of the productive effort that develops deeper reading circuits. That said, there’s a decline of reading in general, especially for leisure. So if this, um, immersive reading is gonna get you to read at all, then Wolf is 100% behind it. Karissa:  Yeah, exactly.  Arielle:  All right. So the fifth solution, the last one that I’m going to be leading in this episode, is called “Zebra Striping Can Cut Hangovers With One Important Catch.” There’s a strategy called zebra striping going around, and that’s alternating each alcoholic drink with a non-alcoholic one throughout a night out or a party or something. About a third of UK adults tried it in 2025, and researchers say it can work, just not quite for the reason most people think it does. So hangovers, they’re not fun. Um, Karissa:  Nope Arielle:  I feel, I mean, it’s such a cliche, but as I get older, it’s harder to bounce back. So I’ve actually started bringing non-alcoholic wine to parties and, uh, kind of drinking that in between, um, “real wine.” So I didn’t even know that this was an official thing that people were doing. Um, but yeah, it, it makes sense in the way that it slows the pace of your drinking, and then you drink fewer drinks overall, ’cause that lowers peak blood alcohol concentration, and yeah, that’s, that’s what’s really going on. It’s not necessarily like you’re hydrating yourself a lot more in between the drinks; if you drink the same amount of alcohol and you’re just layering it with more liquids, then you’re gonna have the same kind of hangover. I think that’s what the article gets at. Karissa:  Yeah, exactly. I think this is a good technique for, many reasons because when you’re out socially, it’s so easy when everybody just continues to keep drinking, has a drink in their hand, to just, you know, keep having an alcoholic drink. But being able to alternate ’cause sometimes it’s just like, you know, you’re not even thinking about the fact that you are drinking.  It makes it easier to turn down the next round when everyone else around you is still going. It’s a good concept too in this big discussion across the world about, uh, being more sober-curious as well and reducing our use of alcohol. Arielle:  Um, yeah, it’s definitely a lot of social pressure when you’re drinking. So if you’re just holding something, then it kind of removes that social pressure a little bit. Karissa:  Okay, well, I’ll take over the solutions from here, Arielle. The next one we had to share is: “A daily pill just doubled survival time for advanced pancreatic cancer.” And the reason it works is because scientists finally cracked something they’ve been trying to crack since the 1980s, and the oncologist who read the trial results cried at her desk, so really huge breakthrough for pancreatic cancer. With this cancer, more than half of the patients were only diagnosed after it has spread, and the five-year survival rate is around 3% for advanced cases. This new drug is a multi-selective inhibitor, which means it glues molecules together to grip and shut down KRAS entirely, regardless of which variant a patient has. The KRAS gene drives over 90% of pancreatic cancers, and it’s been the target of oncologists and researchers since the 1980s. But before, it was considered undruggable because it has no obvious binding pocket, until now, of course. The oncologist who cried at her desk, is Dr. Rachna Shroff at the University of Arizona. She wasn’t actually involved in the trial, but when she read the results, it was really emotional because she’s been treating pancreatic cancer for 16 years. The next challenge, of course, is going to be access to this drug because, half of all pancreatic cancer patients die within three months of diagnosis, and like we mentioned, it’s often diagnosed after it’s spread. So of course, there’s much more work to be done with just diagnosis and, uh, administration. But it’s a good move forward. Okay. Well the next solution is “The urban cooling gap, why planting design matters as much as canopy count.” Cities everywhere are rushing to plant more trees to fight heat, but a new three-city study found that how you plant matters just as much as how much you plant, and in some cases, adding more vegetation actually made things worse. The fix for urban heat isn’t just coverage, it’s the right design. So the key metric here in this study is the mean radiant temperature, which is MRT, that is the heat coming at a person from surrounding surfaces like roads, walls, and buildings, not just the air. And it’s more relevant to how hot it actually feels than air temperature outside.  When actually planting more trees makes the heat worse is, you know, in somewhere like Hong Kong, it could raise humidity enough to offset the cooling, and transpiration helps in dry climates but tips the balance in humid subtropical cities like Hong Kong. So sweat will evaporate more slowly, and people end up less comfortable even if temperatures technically fell under this tree canopy. Arielle:  In the article, they talk about layered vegetation, which is supposed to work best because it’s not just big trees with canopy, but also shrubs and, yeah, just different levels, of vegetation. Um, and that helps break up the density so that airflow can continue instead of getting trapped. Karissa:  The next solution is kind of a fun one. It’s “Why hamsters run on wheels according to 30 years of research.” For a long time, scientists assumed that hamsters run on wheels because they’re bored or neurotic, and, you know, captivity might just be doing something strange to their minds. But then researchers put exercise wheels out into the wild, which is such a fascinating, you know, picture in my mind. Arielle:  Idea, yeah. Karissa:  Yeah. They’re just out there in the middle of nowhere. So they put it in fields and sand dunes with no humans around, and the wild mice found them and ran on them anyways, and researchers concluded that perhaps this is just because they wanted to run for fun. These wild mice found the wheels. They ran on them for up to 18 minutes at a stretch with no training and no food reward. And this actually upended a captivity theory that had dominated for decades. Arielle:  What I also found charming in this article is that it, it mentioned, um, other animals that were attracted to the wheel, like frogs and even slugs, um, and snails, but the snails were excluded from the data because they had, like, way too erratic movement patterns.  Karissa:  Darn. Arielle:  But yeah, I think it’s a, it’s a really interesting study because it also might say something about humans. It said that mice or other rodents that were introduced to the wheel early on in life learned to kind of have fun or find some kind of pleasure out of running on the wheel, and that habit continued into adulthood. But those that weren’t introduced to the wheel very early didn’t really run as much on it. So it could be, you know, a reason to not cut physical education out of schools, for instance, which I know is a, is a thought going around, um, because it might affect how healthy habits are formed in adulthood. Karissa:  Yeah, having this implication that, finding joy in exercising, whether that’s running on a wheel or running around on the playground doing a sport, um, getting that, you know, feeling of fun from physical exercise is very compelling that it could be across the species. So I thought that was cool that this article connected that to kids. And yeah, maybe we need to put some kids on some hamster wheels. I know I would like that. As a child, I loved, um… I mean, they had those big, like, hamster balls, like inflatable balls you could run around in… Arielle:  Oh, yeah! Karissa:  at, like, school events or something. So maybe there’s some kind of, uh, Arielle:  Yeah, some connection there. Yeah. Karissa:  Okay. We’ll move on to another solution that kind of has to do with children as well, speaking of children: “How parents’ phone habits shape their children’s habits according to new research.” Sweden just published new screen time guidelines, but this time they’re not aimed at kids. They’re aimed at parents. The research behind them is a bit uncomfortable if you’re someone who reaches for your phone while your kid is right there. This solution makes a lot of sense on the surface level because what parents do heavily influences what children do. What they see their parents doing, they often mimic. So now Sweden’s Public Health Agency is telling parents to put phones away when they’re with the children and not just limit kids’ own screen time.  Government-commissioned research found two things: parent phone use reduces the quality of parent-child interaction in the moment, and parent screen habits directly shape children’s own screen habits as well. Arielle:  Yeah, modeling behavior is not a new concept in parenting, like you were just saying, Karissa, but I feel like applying it to phones specifically is, um, kind of touchy territory ’cause there’s so many people who are really attached to their phones, and will just casually bring them out during dinner or something like that. But this also, I think it, it, it doesn’t just affect parent-child relationships, it also affects everyone’s interpersonal relationships with each other. When I am having, uh, lunch or something with a friend and they pull out their phone, I also automatically feel like, oh, they’re not really as engaged or connected with me. Karissa:  Absolutely. New specific recommendations are saying that, phones should be down during time with children, and designate bedrooms and dining tables as phone-free zones, and think before posting kids’ photos online as well. And the final solution we had to share this week is “Morning versus night shower: which is better according to experts.” Before I dive in, Arielle, are you a morning or night showerer? Arielle:  I don’t fully subscribe to one or the other. A lot of my friends are either morning or night showerers, but I think it depends on when I get my workout in, which is different every day. Karissa:  I am also the same way. I don’t Arielle:  Hmm. Karissa:  heavily subscribe to either. I’m a sporadic showerer. But some people feel very strongly about morning… Arielle:  Yeah. Karissa:  versus a night shower. It’s a debate that has been running forever, and it turns out that experts actually do have a preference here, I’ll just talk a little bit about what the science says. Sleep science strongly favors nights because a warm shower raises core body temperature, and stepping out triggers a temperature drop, which the brain reads as a cue for sleep. So in, you know, the whole discussion about getting better sleep, this is a very important feature of night showers. Morning showers do the opposite because it raises body temperature and signals wakefulness. It’s useful if you exercise first thing in the morning or need help waking up, but it’s not useful if you already sleep fine. And skin science also leans towards night because it washes off allergens, pollution, and oil accumulated during the day before you spend eight hours with your face on a pillow, and this can be particularly helpful for sensitive or eczema-prone skin. So I guess so far for sleep and, uh, skin science, it does lean towards night a bit. Sorry, morning showers. Arielle:  Yeah. I guess it just depends on what your goals are as well. Karissa:  It depends on your goals, and then, I mean, there is the case of course for morning showers because you can clean the overnight oil and sweat. It’s better for styling curly or frizz-prone hair, which my hair is… There kind of isn’t like a one true winner. It depends on your goals. It depends on your habits as well. But the final call overall is, of course, consistency matters the most. So at the same time most days gives your body a pattern to follow. But I think just in general here, shower everybody. Arielle:  Yeah, just shower consistently. Karissa:  Yeah. Arielle:  Those were all of the solutions that we had this week, but we do have the Emissary shout-out left. Karissa:  Our Emissary shout-out this week is from Patricia and this is what she has to say:  “I would like to share my enthusiasm and gratitude for my participation with the Pachamama Alliance. 30 years they have been active in making known the wisdom of indigenous people all over the world, particularly the teachings regarding the environmental collapse that threatens all life as understood by the indigenous communities of the Amazon Rainforest of Ecuador and Peru. The alliance offers brain-changing virtual courses, inspiring monthly speakers, and suggestions on how to start a satellite group in your community or area to try out new ideas like Earth Listening Circles. It is also possible to arrange trips to Ecuador for a brief but life-changing 10-day visit with two of the indigenous communities living in the jungle. On my trip I learned that we are all connected and here on this shared planet to respect, listen to, learn from, and love each other. We are all earthlings who all must learn to extend sacred reciprocity to Earth and be responsible for the wellbeing of other life forms dwelling here with us. I have developed an insatiable habit of quiet walks in a quiet place just to watch and listen to the natural world that exist among us. I love to meet new people, discover their uniqueness and wonder why it is that we have crossed paths. I meet often with other Pachamama participants. We talk mostly about how we can change ourselves to live in unity with the wishes of Earth herself, creating a connected human presence that is devoted to this planet where all life will thrive. Arielle:  Patricia, thank you so much for sharing this. The Pachamama Alliance sounds like exactly the kind of organization we should all know about, and that phrase, sacred reciprocity, is definitely going to stick with me. Karissa:  And we’ve been lucky at The Optimist Daily to work a little bit with Pachamama Alliance over the years and definitely check out our archive and Pachamama Alliance website, of course. Arielle:  If you are an Emissary or if you want to become an Emissary, remember that this shout-out perk is for you.  Karissa:  Yeah, Emissaries got an email again with the same survey link to, that’s available to you at all times to go in and either a shout-out that we read like we just did, or you can even send us a little voice note if you wanna hear your own voice on the podcast. Arielle:  I guess now we’ll just finish off with our positive quote of the day. Karissa:  “We are not what we know, but what we are willing to learn.” And that’s from MARY CATHERINE BATESON. Arielle:  Optimists, that’s all from us this week. Uh, I hope you have an enjoyable weekend. Karissa:  And we’re looking forward to being back next week with more solutions. Both:  Bye!The post Podcast Transcript June 5th, 2026— Pancreatic cancer cracked, hepatitis B cleared, and wild mice who run for joy first appeared on The Optimist Daily: Making Solutions the News.