BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM For the first time in history, a country is on the verge of eliminating a form of cancer entirely. Australia is on track to reach that milestone by 2035, and possibly sooner, through a combination of widespread HPV vaccination and a screening system that has been rebuilt from scratch. “It’s the first time that the WHO, and globally, we’ve said we’re going to eliminate a cancer,” said Professor Karen Canfell, an epidemiologist whose modeling helped chart the path to elimination with the World Health Organization. “That’s actually a new concept for cancer.” How the program came together In 2006, scientists at the University of Queensland developed Gardasil, a vaccine designed to prevent HPV infection. Since HPV is the primary cause of cervical cancer, the fourth most common cancer in women worldwide, the vaccine was immediately significant. Australia became the first country to launch a national vaccination program the following year. The program has expanded considerably since then. In 2013, it was extended to include boys, who can carry and transmit HPV without developing cervical cancer themselves. In 2017, Australia was among the first nations to replace the traditional pap smear with a more sensitive HPV-based cervical screening test, required only every five years. More recently, it became one of the first to offer women the option of collecting their own sample, removing a barrier for those who find pelvic exams difficult or whose access to healthcare is limited by time or geography. The combined effect has been dramatic. Since records began in 1982, both incidence and mortality rates for cervical cancer in Australia have halved. The most recent data, from 2021, showed something that had never happened before: for the first time, there were no cervical cancer cases diagnosed in women under the age of 25. “It’s not all women of all ages yet, but you can see that concept of elimination being realised,” Canfell said. Australia currently has about 6.3 new cases per 100,000 women. The WHO defines elimination as fewer than four cases per 100,000, which means the country is not there yet, but the trajectory has assessors who are confident the target is within reach. Vaccination among girls under 15 sits just above 80 percent, and 85 percent of women in the most critical screening age group have been tested. The gaps that remain Progress has been uneven. Cervical cancer rates among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women are twice as high as the national average, and Indigenous women are more than three times as likely to die from the disease. “They’re often detected at a later stage of cancer than non-Indigenous women,” said Dr. Natalie Strobel, an epidemiologist specializing in disease prevention in Indigenous communities. On the current trajectory, elimination for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women is projected to arrive 12 years later than the national 2035 target. Researchers have identified several contributing factors: higher rates of vaccine hesitancy following the COVID-19 pandemic, rising costs of medical services, and children missing school-based vaccination with no organized follow-up to ensure they catch up. A model others are following Australia’s approach has become a template. “Public health innovations in Australia sort of gave a general exemplar for WHO to follow,” Canfell said. Sweden and Rwanda have both set targets of eliminating cervical cancer by 2027, though both are trailing their key milestones. The United Kingdom has set a goal of 2040 and is working to reverse recent declines in both vaccination and screening rates. Meanwhile, cuts to international aid have complicated the picture globally. In March 2025, the US government ended its support for Gavi, an alliance that funds HPV vaccination in lower-income countries. Canfell acknowledged the gap plainly: “To say the obvious thing, we are obviously lucky to be in a high-income country where we have a form of universal healthcare and access for all.” Australia is now using public funding and philanthropy to help neighbors, including Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea, pursue elimination. Whether that kind of support can survive the wider pullback in global health investment remains an open question, but the scientific foundation for what comes next is already laid. A cancer that has shaped the lives of women and families for generations is now, in at least one country, within reach of being eliminated entirely.       Did this solution stand out? Share it with a friend or support our mission by becoming an Emissary.The post Australia is on track to eliminate a form of cancer entirely first appeared on The Optimist Daily: Making Solutions the News.

BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM There is something that happens in a dream that never happens anywhere else. A familiar place, a workplace or a school corridor, becomes somehow wrong, layered with elements that don’t belong, approached from a direction that doesn’t exist. That sense of wrongness is, it turns out, the point. New findings from the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca show that the sleeping brain doesn’t simply replay the day. It actively reshapes it. Familiar settings aren’t reproduced during sleep; they’re reimagined into vivid, often immersive scenes that combine different elements and shift perspective in unexpected ways. The brain, in other words, is not a recorder. It’s an editor. How scientists studied what happens while we sleep The study, published in Communications Psychology, analyzed more than 3,700 reports drawn from both dreams and waking experiences, collected from 287 participants between the ages of 18 and 70. Over two weeks, participants kept daily logs of their experiences, while scientists gathered data on sleep habits, personality traits, and psychological profiles. To make sense of that volume of material, the team used natural language processing tools, a form of AI capable of reading the meaning and structure of language at scale. This allowed them to detect patterns in dream content that would have been impossible to identify by hand. “Our findings show that dreams are not just a reflection of past experiences, but a dynamic process shaped by who we are and what we live through,” said Valentina Elce, a researcher at IMT and lead author of the study. “By combining large-scale data with computational methods, we were able to uncover patterns in dream content that were previously difficult to detect.” Personality shapes what happens in sleep Not everyone dreams in the same way, and the study found that individual traits predict a lot about dream style. People who tend to mind-wander more often reported dreams that were fragmented and shifting, with no stable through-line. Those who place greater importance on dreams and believe they carry meaning tended to report richer, more immersive experiences, vivid environments, rather than scattered impressions. The study also revealed how large-scale events leave their mark. Data collected during the COVID-19 lockdown, gathered by researchers at Sapienza University of Rome and later compared with the IMT team’s findings, showed that dreams during that period were more emotionally intense and frequently included themes of restriction and confinement. As time passed and people adjusted, those patterns gradually faded, suggesting that dream content tracks psychological adaptation to major disruptions, not just the disruptions themselves. What this means for understanding the mind The practical implications reach beyond sleep science. Natural language processing models were able to analyze the meaning and structure of dream reports with accuracy comparable to human evaluators, suggesting that these tools could make it significantly easier to study consciousness, memory, and mental health at scale and with greater consistency. Dreams, the study suggests, offer a window into something that isn’t immediately visible in waking life: the way personality and lived experience get folded together into the sleeping mind’s nightly reconstruction of reality. What’s being built in that process isn’t a copy. It’s something shaped by who you are, what you’ve lived through, and where your attention tends to wander. That complexity, once too unwieldy to examine at any meaningful scale, is now something scientists are beginning to map. Source study: Communications Psychology— Individual traits and experiences predict the content of dreams     Did this solution stand out? Share it with a friend or support our mission by becoming an Emissary.The post New research explains why your dreams feel so strange first appeared on The Optimist Daily: Making Solutions the News.

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. In otter news This year marks 50 years since Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) began its efforts to reintroduce otters to the state’s waterways. Once a common sight, Colorado’s river otters were extirpated by the early 1900s due to unregulated trapping and pollution. Now, according to a Colorado Public Radio story shared by RTBC Executive Editor Will Doig, there are clear signs that the species is on the upswing, but CPW is asking Coloradans for help tracking appearances of the elusive, playful creatures via the citizen science platform iNaturalist. iNaturalist has a strong track record when it comes to such efforts: Read our 2022 story about how its users are unearthing new species, tracking invasive species and making incredible discoveries. Will says: I never knew that Colorado’s rivers were once chock full of otters! And yes, I realize that charismatic animals get a disproportionate share of conservation attention, but still: SO CUTE. Ghost busting You apply for a job. You sweat through an interview or two or five. You wait. And — crickets. In Ontario, this silence is now illegal: As Positive News reports in a story shared by Contributing Editor Geetanjali Krishna, the Canadian province has passed a law requiring companies to let candidates know whether or not they got the job. Employers who “ghost” job candidates face fines of up to $100,000 CAD (about $73,000 USD). Geetanjali says: Found this story about Ontario’s latest law that penalizes companies for ghosting job candidates really interesting because, let’s face it, all of us have either experienced it, or know someone who’s been ghosted. There should not be any need to legislate what is simply good professional behavior, but perhaps it’s a sign of our times that such a law is even necessary. What else we’re reading These Countries Embrace E.V.s to Avoid Oil Price Shocks — shared by Editorial Director Rebecca Worby from the New York Times Why millions of adorable bees are emerging from this cemetery — shared by Geetanjali Krishna from Grist America the Undammed — shared by Contributing Editor Michaela Haas from the New York Times Preserving pollinators is good for health — and income — shared by Rebecca Worby from NPR In other news… We’re thrilled that a RTBC story by Contributing Editor Michaela Haas — about how former Navy SEALS and other veterans have found a new sense of purpose in ocean conservation — is a finalist for the L.A. Press Club Awards in the category of health and science solutions journalism.  The awards will be announced in June at the 2026 SoCal Journalism Awards gala. The post What We’re Reading: Otter-Spotting on Colorado’s Rivers appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.

When we talk about someone having a “terminal illness,” we generally mean an incurable, progressive disease that will eventually end someone’s life. Advanced cancer, end-stage heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease, Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and many other diseases are widely accepted as terminal in modern medicine. Most medical institutions don’t include mental illnesses in that category either, for understandable ethical reasons. But as actor Martin Short shares from firsthand experience, viewing treatment-resistant mental illness as “terminal” can help families process the loss of a loved one to suicide. In an interview with CBS Sunday Morning, Short compared losing his 42-year-old daughter, Katherine, to suicide in 2026 with losing his wife, Nancy, to cancer in 2010. “You know, it’s been a nightmare for the family,” Short said when asked what he wanted to share about Katherine’s death. “But the understanding that mental health and cancer, like my wife, are both diseases. And sometimes with diseases, they are terminal. And my daughter fought for a long time with extreme mental health, borderline personality disorder, other things, and did the best she could until she couldn’t. So Nan’s last words to me were, ‘Martin, let me go.’ And she was just saying, ‘Dad, let me go.'” Adding nuance to the “suicide is preventable” conversation Short is speaking a hard truth that goes against the unequivocal messaging that suicide is preventable. As with so many human realities, conversations about mental health and suicide require nuance. Those who have seen a loved one through every available treatment, medication, therapy, and program, only to lose them to suicide after trying everything, play an important role in that conversation. We understand that many deaths from cancer and heart disease are preventable, but not all are. While mental illness may not be directly comparable to those diseases, the reality is that some illnesses, both physical and mental, resist even the best and most effective treatments. So glad this is going viral, someone I knew in college lost his mental health battle and his parents described it as a terminal illness at his memorial and it really opened my eyes and helped me accept mental illness. https://t.co/nTs5bJpPNn— Livyjedi (@livyjedi) May 11, 2026 As Sophia Laurenzi shared in her Time essay, “The Problem With Saying Suicide Is Preventable,” the blanket message that suicide can be prevented places an unfair burden on individuals and families. Acknowledging the complex reality of suicide prevention “Though well-intentioned, the truth is that not all suicides can be stopped, even with the best efforts,” Laurenzi wrote. “But right after my father’s death, everywhere I looked I read that suicide is preventable. This instilled an immediate, unconscious conviction in me of a double failure: my father, who had not done enough to save himself, and those of us who loved him most, who had not done enough, either. Collectively we could have deterred his death. But we did not.” This feeling of failure and guilt prompted Laurenzi to dive deeply into suicide education and advocacy. That deep dive led her to the conclusion that while suicide prevention efforts are important, so is acknowledging the complex reality that a 100% success rate on that front is not currently possible. “The crux of the issue with blanketing suicide as something that can be stopped is that it flattens one of the most confounding psychological, medical, and philosophical questions of being human into something simpler than its reality,” she wrote. “Perhaps one day we will be able to say that, with the right blueprint, suicide is preventable. But we do not have the knowledge, let alone the resources, to make that true now.” “Maybe by sharing your pain, you will help other people’s pain”: After losing his daughter, Katherine, to suicide earlier this year, Martin Short told Tracy Smith about why he isn’t hiding his grief. pic.twitter.com/SQHvnEnt5u— CBS Sunday Morning (@CBSSunday) May 12, 2026 To be clear, acknowledging that suicide isn’t always preventable is not the same as saying suicide is inevitable. Most suicides are preventable, and people should absolutely exhaust all preventative measures and possibilities. Knowing typical warning signs, having access to mental health treatment, limiting access to firearms and other highly lethal methods, and following other best practices are vital to giving someone the best chance of surviving a suicidal mental illness. Keeping hope in the balance Acknowledging that mental illness can be “terminal” also doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t have hope. Many illnesses that used to be terminal diagnoses—HIV, cholera, and more—are now totally survivable thanks to advances in medicine. Just because some people’s mental illness resists all known treatments now doesn’t mean we won’t find more effective treatments in the future. Most mental illnesses, even many serious ones, are currently treatable. To help those in crisis and considering suicide, we recommend using @intheforefront 'LEARN Saves Lives' tips. Most suicides are preventable, see more resources like this on https://t.co/q8LD9ktWKl #BeInjuryFree #NationalInjuryDayHPRC pic.twitter.com/8EnbfdStJg— Harborview Injury Prevention & Research Center (@HIPRC) November 18, 2020 But in some cases, for some people, having all the access in the world to resources, support, and treatment may not be enough. Just as doctors can exhaust all treatments for physical illnesses, people can also exhaust all treatments for mental illnesses. That doesn’t mean anyone should ever give up hope or stop trying. It means that families and friends who did everything they could, and who knew their loved one fought as long and hard as they were able to, can find peace in understanding that their loved one who died by suicide was dealing with a terminal, treatment-resistant illness that ultimately took their life. Short shared that he’s gotten involved with Bring Change to Mind, an organization started by actress Glenn Close, which he said is “taking mental health out of the shadows.” “Not being ashamed of it, not hiding from the word ‘suicide,’ but accepting that this can be the last stage of an illness,” said Short. “That’s my approach to this.” Watch Short’s full interview: The post After daughter’s death, Martin Short says he understands mental illness can be ‘terminal’ appeared first on Upworthy.

Being on a plane can be a nuisance on its own, but when there is an unruly passenger, it goes from an annoyance to a potential danger. On a Jet2 flight, a passenger was so belligerently drunk and rude to the staff that the plane was going to be diverted. Then hope arrived in the form of an eight-year-old soccer fan. Phoenix Rose and his father were cutting their vacation in Turkey short. They had to catch a flight home to Manchester due to a family emergency. During the flight, a passenger had too much to drink before boarding. She even had her open bottle of whiskey confiscated. This caused the irate passenger to disrupt the flight, shouting and swearing at the flight attendants. The passenger became so unruly that the flight attendants made an announcement: The flight would be diverted to remove her from the plane. And a child would lead them Phoenix was desperate to get home to deal with his family emergency. He didn’t want the flight to be diverted and cause a delay. On a whim, he asked a flight attendant if he could sit next to the angry passenger. He asked for only 30 seconds. The flight attendants gave Phoenix a chance. They switched his seat to one next to the unruly passenger. And it worked. “He just took all the control,” James, Phoenix’s father, told BelfastLive. “Phoenix, he got his cards out, he started singing to her this Dance Monkey song.” “She’s screaming, she’s shouting, she’s still being irate. And he starts singing to her, he starts talking about his football to her, talking about her family, asking her about her kids,” James told BBC News. “I’m sort of sat there in the end and I’m thinking to myself, thank god that Phoenix is with me because if he wasn’t, I don’t think I would have been able to handle it.” View this post on Instagram The young master of de-escalation Knowingly or instinctively, Phoenix practiced effective de-escalation techniques while talking to the passenger. This included finding common ground, listening to her talk about her family, and using several other strategies. Phoenix even calmly reminded her of the consequences. He told the passenger that she could be arrested if she couldn’t calm down, but quickly encouraged her to talk about her kids. For three and a half hours, Phoenix chatted with the passenger. They discussed his love of soccer, his YouTube channel, and their families. Phoenix also showed her his trading cards of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. An eight-year-old accomplished what a plane full of adults struggled to do. After the plane landed at its destination, the pilot and flight attendants thanked Phoenix for preventing a forced flight diversion. That would have been costly for both the airline and the passengers in terms of time and money. The passenger was taken into custody by authorities. A spokesperson for Jet2 thanked Phoenix and rewarded him and his dad with free flight vouchers. A little bit of kindness and the wisdom of a young kid were all it took to ease an intense and volatile situation. The post 8-year-old prevents flight from being diverted by soothing unruly passenger with ‘Dance Monkey’ song appeared first on Upworthy.