Chloe Huddle graduated from GCU with a degree in educational studies. Among those in attendance was Alan Kent, the firefighter who delivered her 22 years ago. Source: Firefighter who delivered baby 22 years ago attends her GCU graduation Lovely.

Iraq has undertaken substantial preservation work on the ancient Ziggurat of Ur to protect it from the elements of a changing climate. One of the most recognizable examples of Sumerian architecture, it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site that stands at extreme risk of erosion and damage. Ur is one of the oldest urban settlements known, […] The post Iraq Embarks on Preservation Work for the Ziggurat of Ur Using Bricks of Identical Material to 5,000-yo Original appeared first on Good News Network.

When Mr. Carl Craft nearly died from a brain hemorrhage, he and his wife Dawn reviewed their bucket list. Carl wanted to travel, Dawn said she wanted to go to medical school. “He thought I was crazy,” she said. Now though, Dawn Zuidgeest-Craft proudly carries a doctorate in medicine after finishing as the school’s oldest-ever […] The post Senior Scholar Fulfills Life-long Dream to Graduate Medical School–a Doctor at 73-Years Young appeared first on Good News Network.

BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Two years ago, Molly Kelley found out that a close family friend had used a nudification website to make nonconsensual deepfake images of her and dozens of other women. About 80 women in Minnesota were affected by the same person. When she tried to figure out what legal recourse she had, she found almost none. The images were stored only on the man’s computer, so laws banning dissemination didn’t apply. There was no indication of intent to share them, which ruled out the state’s revenge porn statute. None of the women were minors, so possessing the images wasn’t a crime. No existing law allowed her to sue for restitution. So she started making phone calls. “This has taken every spare moment I have,” Kelley said. She educated lawmakers, gave testimony, and advocated for the better part of two years, all while raising two children, working full-time, and completing law school. The result of that work passed the Minnesota Senate 65-0, and last week, Governor Tim Walz signed House File 1606, making the decision final. What the law actually does Minnesota House File 1606 is the first law in the United States to ban nudification apps, the tools that allow anyone to upload a photograph of a clothed person and have it digitally transformed to appear nude. No technical skill required. Rather than targeting the people who misuse these tools, the bill targets the function of the technology itself. The law will allow survivors to sue app owners for damages. The state attorney general will also be empowered to collect fines of up to $500,000 per violation. The bill includes an exemption for general editing tools like Photoshop, where producing nonconsensual intimate imagery requires meaningful technical expertise. The target is software built specifically to automate the process. Why this was harder to address than it sounds Federal efforts to create similar protections have stalled repeatedly. The DEFIANCE Act, which would create a civil right of action for survivors of nonconsensual deepfakes, has twice passed the Senate but has not reached a House floor vote. Last year’s Take It Down Act made it a federal crime to share nonconsensual intimate images, but it does not allow survivors to sue the platforms or app makers. That gap matters because, as Kelley’s case illustrated, many incidents of this kind never involve images being shared at all. The harm begins at creation. “These images don’t exist without a third-party involvement and some sort of machine learning model,” she said. “I’ve dedicated the past two years of my life to finding a solution to mitigate the harm when it’s actually caused, which is at creation.” The scale of the problem has grown quickly. In December, X’s integrated chatbot Grok generated and posted over 1.8 million sexualized images of women in nine days after enabling free image generation, according to reporting from The New York Times and the Center for Countering Digital Hate. X had apparently made significant efforts to curb nonconsensual deepfakes, but users have continued to find ways around its guardrails. The independent media organization Indicator has tracked 23 cases of deepfake abuse targeting school communities across the United States since 2023. RAINN, which runs the national sexual assault hotline, has reported an increase in children calling about digital violence over the past five years. A Centers for Disease Control survey conducted from 2023 to 2024 found that one in 10 women had experienced tech-facilitated sexual abuse in the prior year; one in three said the same when asked about their lifetime. What comes next California and other states have moved to hold creators and platforms accountable for deepfakes, but Minnesota’s law is the first to target the underlying technology at the point of production. Kelley sees the issue in terms that go beyond any single piece of legislation. “Deep down, this is a manipulation and a control issue of women,” she said. The Trump administration has indicated support for federal preemption of state AI laws, which could void Minnesota’s bill if that policy is formalized. For now, advocates are waiting on the governor’s signature and watching to see whether other states follow Minnesota’s lead before federal policy settles the question.     Did this solution stand out? Share it with a friend or support our mission by becoming an Emissary.The post Minnesota just banned the apps that make deepfake nudes first appeared on The Optimist Daily: Making Solutions the News.

BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from doing everything right. The career is advancing, the goals are being ticked off, and the productivity is real. And yet something feels off, or hollow, or impossible to name. Modern culture tends to treat this as ingratitude or a failure of mindset. A large body of evidence suggests it’s something more structural: an imbalance in which needs are actually being met. Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the pyramid-shaped model most people encountered in a psychology class, has held up better than critics expected. A study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology analyzed data from more than 60,000 participants across 123 countries and found that fulfillment of Maslow’s needs, including basic security, belonging, and respect, independently predicted life satisfaction and positive emotions. Just as importantly, meeting higher-level needs didn’t cancel out the lower ones. You can’t outgrow the need for safety by achieving enough. You can’t compensate for loneliness with accomplishment. The needs stack, and neglecting any layer has consequences. The safety problem  Ambition is celebrated in modern Western culture. Stability, less so. The cultural script praises risk-taking, career pivots, and the willingness to start over, while treating the desire for predictability as a lack of vision. But Maslow argued that safety needs, including financial stability, health security, and a reliable sense of what tomorrow looks like, form a non-negotiable psychological foundation. A study published in Science backs him up. It found that financial scarcity significantly shrinks cognitive bandwidth, meaning that when people feel economically insecure, their mental capacity gets consumed by short-term pressure, making it harder to plan, to think clearly, and to sustain executive function. What matters for wellbeing, the data suggests, isn’t income level itself but the sense of security it does or doesn’t produce. Someone with fewer resources who feels stable can experience greater life satisfaction than someone wealthier who doesn’t. That distinction matters for high achievers too. Someone who is objectively successful but chronically sleep-deprived, financially anxious, or stretched beyond their limits is operating without a stable base. “Nine times out of 10, the result of this will be burnout disguised as ‘dreaming big’ or ‘grinding,’” American psychologist Mark Travers noted. If reaching higher keeps failing, building a more solid floor is often the better starting point. The belonging gap Maslow placed love and belonging near the center of his model, not near the top, because human beings are wired for connection in ways that cut deeper than comfort or preference. The physical effects of getting this wrong are striking. A meta-analysis published in Perspectives on Psychological Science found that social isolation and loneliness significantly raise the risk of premature mortality. The effect is comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. More surprising still: the harm from isolation was stronger than the health effects of either obesity or physical inactivity. Modern life has made this easier to miss. Remote work reduces incidental contact with others. Social media creates visibility without intimacy. Achievement culture rewards competition over connection, making it possible to stay in constant contact with people while feeling genuinely alone. When belonging is missing, everything built on top of it becomes less durable. Accomplishment starts to feel isolating rather than satisfying. Motivation becomes brittle. The social reinforcement that makes goals feel meaningful is simply absent. The esteem trap Esteem sits one level below self-actualization in Maslow’s model, encompassing both self-respect and recognition from others. In theory, it should fuel growth. In practice, many people outsource it to metrics that are inherently unstable: social media engagement, performance reviews, productivity numbers, or physical appearance. A study in the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology found that social comparison on social media predicts depressive symptoms and lower self-esteem. The more tightly someone ties their sense of self-worth to external feedback, the more volatile their emotional state becomes. Setbacks that would otherwise be manageable start to feel threatening to identity. Plateaus feel like failure. The pursuit of meaning gets replaced by the pursuit of approval, which is a significantly less satisfying destination. The alternative, building a sense of self-worth that holds steady in the absence of achievement or recognition, doesn’t mean lowering ambition. It means detaching ambition from the need for constant validation. That shift, modest as it sounds, is what allows goals to feel sustaining rather than exhausting.     Did this solution stand out? Share it with a friend or support our mission by becoming an Emissary.The post The 3 needs that science says matter more than success and achievement first appeared on The Optimist Daily: Making Solutions the News.