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. From high waists to low waste The European Union is no longer allowing unsold fashion and footwear to be destroyed — it has to be reused or recycled, as Earth.org reports in a story shared by Contributing Editor Michaela Haas. Each year, it’s estimated that four to nine percent of unsold textiles are destroyed in the EU, and 92 metric tons of textiles are sent to landfills worldwide. Earth.org describes the EU ban as a “strategic opportunity for companies to rethink their production and supply chains.” Those companies might take inspiration from Michaela’s recent RTBC story about a fashion brand whose clothes are fully compostable. Michaela says: Following up from my clean fashion addiction — this is a huge step for making “fast fashion” less wasteful. Going dark Speaking of fashion, are dark robes going to be the next summer trend? Probably not, but according to a New York Times story that grabbed Executive Editor Will Doig’s attention, science shows that wearing them does in fact have a cooling effect.  The story includes a number of surprising ways to keep cool, including the use of vetiver grass screens, which RTBC reported on as part of our Living Paradigms series last year. Will says: With Europe sweltering and New York recently experiencing its hottest day in 14 years, I’m ready to try anything (though I’ll probably dress in dark, flowing robes only as a last resort). What else we’re reading Philly’s Zero Fare Transit Program Has Been Extended, But Advocates Want More — shared by Contributing Editor Geetanjali Krishna from Next City Can four SFU grads remake the electricity market with old EV batteries? — shared by Editorial Director Rebecca Worby from Be Giant Switzerland’s solar railway has been a success. What happens next? — shared by Will Doig from Euronews Dam Removal Efforts Lead to a Stunning Comeback for Maine’s Alewives — shared by Editorial Director Rebecca Worby from Inside Climate News From our readers… We’ve reported on the healing power of music, and we’re always interested in learning about more ways that music and sound can improve health. Reader Arlynda wrote to tell us about Ted Gioia’s recent Substack post on healing through ultrasound. Gioia highlights a remarkable MIT study in which researchers used 40 Hz sound waves to successfully eliminate 50 percent of the brain plaque associated with Alzheimer’s. Thanks, Arlynda! The post What We’re Reading: In Europe, Clothing Waste Is Unfashionable — and Illegal appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.

BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM Every air conditioner does the same thing: pull heat from inside a building and dump it outside. On a hot day, millions of units doing that together push street temperatures up, which makes the next hot day worse. “Everything that requires energy releases heat, and that heat has to go somewhere,” said Sophie Parison, a researcher in Paris focused on urban heat and cooling. Paris has been building a different model for thirty years and is now planning to triple it. How the Seine becomes a cooling utility Fraîcheur de Paris, which translates roughly as “the freshness of Paris,” operates 120 kilometers (75 miles) of underground pipes beneath the city. Cold water drawn from the Seine runs through one pipe parallel to a second pipe carrying warm return water from connected buildings. A heat exchanger moves warmth across a thin metal wall between them, the two fluids never touching. The cooled water circulates back into the buildings; the Seine water goes back to the river, slightly warmer than it left. Monitoring has so far shown that those temperature changes stay within environmental limits with no measurable harm to the river’s ecology. The Louvre, the Grand Palais, hospitals, schools, and major office districts are already on the network. Cooling is produced at a central point and piped out like electricity or water. The expansion Paris plans to triple the network’s size by 2042, reaching more than 3,000 buildings across all of the city’s arrondissements. Hospitals, schools, day-care centers, and retirement homes are the top priorities. “The ambition is to move from a historic network focused on large tertiary buildings to a city-wide infrastructure,” said Tim Guigon, a spokesperson for Fraîcheur de Paris. The 20-year contract, renewed in 2022 and valued at €2.4 billion (roughly $2.6 billion), is held jointly by transportation company RATP and Engie. The city of Paris owns the network outright. The energy case Individual AC units are energy-hungry, and because they push heat outside, millions of them running in parallel collectively raise the temperatures they are there to lower. District cooling cuts into that loop. “The energy consumption should be much less than if the same cooling were provided by modular systems,” said Charles Simpson, a senior researcher in climate change at University College London. Pauline Lavaud, the city’s director of climate transition, said the network “offers much higher energy and environmental performance than individual cooling systems.” Whether Paris residents buy fewer window units as the network grows is a real test of that claim. The 2.1 million people living in Paris aren’t all eligible for connection, but every reduction in individual unit adoption takes some load off the grid and keeps waste heat off the streets. What makes it work, and where it won’t Stockholm uses Baltic Sea water for the same purpose. Toronto draws from Lake Ontario. Neither city copied Paris’s system; both adapted the underlying logic to fit what they had. That’s the whole point. A district cooling network only works where the conditions line up: dense enough demand to justify the infrastructure, and water nearby with the right temperature and flow. The Thames doesn’t qualify. London’s underground is also already packed with utility lines and Tube tunnels, which makes even the geometry difficult. Cities in the global south face a harder version of the same problem. Building one of these systems costs a lot upfront, and high interest rates make the financing punishing. The one exception might be cities without much buried underground already, where you’re not navigating around existing infrastructure and the math can look different. “Actions must always be adapted to the type of city and local issues,” said Emmanuel Gendreau, an ecologist and environmentalist at the Sorbonne. “It is crucial not to simply apply adaptations that have already worked in one city directly to another.”     Did this solution stand out? Share it with a friend or support our mission by becoming an Emissary.The post How Paris uses the Seine to cool thousands of buildings without AC first appeared on The Optimist Daily: Making Solutions the News.

BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM If you’re a parent, you’ve had these moments. Not the big, dramatic parenting failures, the ones easy to identify and easier to learn from. The small ones. You held it together through the checkout meltdown, through the bath time standoff, through the third request for one more story. And then, suddenly, you snap. Your voice turns sharp. You say something you immediately wish you could take back. The silence that follows feels worse than all the build-up that came before it. If you’ve spent any time in that silence, replaying the moment, wondering what kind of parent loses it over something as trivial as, let’s say, a snack, there’s something the research on secure attachment says about this that a lot of parents don’t think about. The moment you’re fixated on is probably not the one that matters most. The standard nobody can meet The idea that good parenting means staying regulated through every hard moment has become an almost impossible standard, one that social media has done little to help. But from a clinical standpoint, constant regulation was never realistic. “Our bodies were never meant to be constantly regulated,” says Tracy Carson, a licensed professional clinical counselor. “Our fight-or-flight response is embedded in our nervous system for a reason: It senses danger and threat, and as a parent, we are constantly needing to assess those things.” When you try to override that system, eventually it pushes back. And when it does, guilt arrives so fast and sits so heavily that many parents stay frozen in the aftermath, focused on what happened rather than what could come next. What could come next is the repair. That’s the moment, the reparation, that is the true game changer. What the research tells us Research on secure attachment, the kind of bond that predicts emotional health, resilience, and the capacity for healthy relationships across a lifetime, has long suggested something that runs counter to what most parents are told. Children don’t need flawless parents. They need parents who come back. Francesca Emma, a licensed mental health counselor, points to findings suggesting that a caregiver only needs to be truly attuned to their child about 30 percent of the time. That’s not because the other 70 percent doesn’t matter, but because full attunement means being completely in sync with your child’s emotional state in real time. No parent can hold that constantly, and children are resilient in the gaps. What shapes a child’s sense of security is not whether a parent manages every moment perfectly, but whether the caregiver comes back after the hard ones. Each time a repair follows a rupture, a neural pathway forms in a child’s developing brain, encoding a specific message: relationships are safe, disturbance is survivable, the person who loves you will come back. When repair is absent, a different pathway forms instead. “The neural pathway that gets developed is one that indicates their parental figure is not safe,” Carson explains. How repair works Repair doesn’t require a formal apology or a long conversation. The steps are simpler than the shame makes them feel. Carson recommends stabilizing yourself first, even if that means telling your child you need a minute. Something like “Mommy needs a minute, I’ll be right back” does more good than a rushed apology delivered before you’re ready. When you return, lead with your own behavior, not your child’s. “Name your behavior first,” Carson says. “I am so sorry that I lost my temper. That was not right.” Then offer connection: a hug, sitting close, something that signals the rupture is closed. It can start earlier than most parents expect, too. Olivia Pham, a licensed marriage and family therapist, notes that repair can begin in infancy. A bottle set down too hard, a moment of walking away because the crying was endless. Coming back and saying “Mommy needed a second to breathe. I’m here. I’m sorry” is what this looks like when a child is small. The brain stays more elastic than most people realize, Carson adds. Old patterns can be interrupted. The parent who begins repairing at 40 is doing the same neurological work as the one who started from the beginning. The guilt that keeps you frozen What makes repair hard for most parents is not a lack of love or intention. It’s the guilt that arrives after a hard moment and lands so heavily that many parents spend far more time inside it than moving through it. Emma offers the most useful reframe: shift from “why did I do that?” to “what can I do about it now?” The guilt belongs to you; it is not your child’s experience, and staying inside it doesn’t help either of you. “Your child doesn’t need you to be perfect,” Emma says. “They need you to come back and be honest.” “Your kids don’t need a perfect parent,” Pham adds. “They need a good enough parent.” Pham describes emotional regulation like an ocean: always in motion, sometimes crashing, sometimes quiet, alive precisely because it moves. “There isn’t going to be a time where there are no waves hitting the beach of your life,” she says. A flat sea, she points out, would be a very flat life.     Did this solution stand out? Share it with a friend or support our mission by becoming an Emissary.The post The 30 percent parenting rule: how to raise securely attached kids first appeared on The Optimist Daily: Making Solutions the News.

Jeffrey Tazzara was packing up for a Fourth of July party at his home in Connecticut when he heard his dog, Bella, barking more aggressively than usual. He told ABC News he knew something was up, but he had no idea how serious the situation could have been “A vicious bark, not like she barks and yips and howls and stuff … this was a different kind of bark,” he told the news source. Jeffrey’s home surveillance caught his dog chasing a bear away from his 6-year-old son, saving him from what could have been a horrible injury. View this post on Instagram A post shared by ABC 7 Chicago (@abc7chicago) Jeffrey Tazzara Could Hardly Believe What He Saw “Bella finally caught up to the bear, like right in the middle of the driveway, and she bit it in the rear end, and the bear ended up crashing into my boat, and then I think [it] scurried under the boat and then through the back between the houses and into the woods,” Jeffrey Tazzara said. Video of Bella chasing off the bear amazed people. “Look at the dog protecting its family. This is why I love dogs! They are amazing family members,” someone wrote. Other husky owners agreed. Like this person who wrote, “I have two huskies, and they are the same way with my grandkids. Good job! Papi!” And this person had the perfect idea for Bella. “Give that dog plenty of hugs and kisses and buy him a huge steak!! She is the reason your son is alive! Love to you Bella!!!” They suggested. Jeffrey Tazzara said he rewarded Bella with a nice steak. She more than earned it. This story’s featured image can be found here

Listen, would Rihanna telling you that “you’re fire” fix all the problems in your life? No. But would it, even if for a moment, make life feel better despite those problems? Abso-freakin-lutely.  Such was the case for one fan who spotted Rih Rih checking out at the grocery store and asked the singer to take a selfie. The woman was also excited to share that her name was Robin, which happens to be Rihanna’s legal first name (Robyn).  Rihanna acquiesced, and, as the two began posing, the woman warned her: “I look terrible. I live with cancer.”  Rihanna immediately responded, “You don’t look terrible,” to which Robin shared, “Everyone knows me, I don’t have my wig on.” This prompted the “Umbrella” singer to say, “You know what I live for? A good hairline, honey. This is what I like to see. Anytime you meet anybody, don’t do that. You’re fire just like that.” Beaming, this fan asked, “Can I quote you?” Rihanna responded, “Hell yeah…You’re fire!” View this post on Instagram A few heartfelt words carry a lot of weight For many people receiving cancer treatment, changes in appearance can be among the hardest parts of the experience. Hair loss, changes in skin, scars, weight fluctuations, and other physical effects can leave someone feeling like they no longer recognize the person staring back in the mirror. Even when family and friends offer reassurance, it can take time to rebuild confidence. That’s what makes this interaction feel so meaningful. Rihanna met her with warmth, looked her in the eye, and reminded her that she was worthy of feeling good about herself exactly as she was in that moment. Small acts of kindness can make a lasting impact Sad woman with cancer. Canva Compliments—whether from a celebrity or not—may seem simple, but they can carry tremendous weight for someone navigating illness. A sincere comment about a smile, a laugh, a hairstyle, or simply telling someone they look great can provide a welcome boost on a difficult day. The key is making the compliment genuine and allowing the person to receive it without questioning or qualifying it. On that note, people living with cancer often say that being treated normally can also be comforting. Asking about hobbies, sharing a laugh, or spending time together without making every conversation about the disease can help restore a sense of familiarity when so much else feels uncertain. Rihanna has built a reputation for moments like this @funny.pet0222 Rihanna isn’t just a global icon – she’s a masterclass in treating everyone like royalty. From fans to staff, watch how respect became her most powerful accessory. #Rihanna #Respect #KindnessMatters #CelebrityHumanity #fentyqueen ♬ suono originale – sophia ★ Longtime fans were not surprised by Rihanna’s response, but that didn’t stop them from giving her some praise in the comments. “Rihanna is such a sweet soul” “She literally always have the nicest things to strangers” “She always has the the cutest interactions.” “She that girl for real.” “Love you Rihanna. You just know how to lift up another gorgeous woman.” Over the years, Rihanna has developed a reputation for taking time to connect with people in memorable ways: from inviting fans onstage during performances, to sharing heartfelt interactions at meet-and-greets, and using her platform to support charitable causes through the Clara Lionel Foundation, which funds education, emergency response, and global health initiatives. Whether she’s launching a beauty brand with a more inclusive shade range or taking an extra minute to reassure a stranger in a grocery store, Rihanna often finds ways to make people feel seen. As for Robin, she now has a simple two-word mantra she can carry with her whenever self-doubt creeps in: “You’re fire!” The post Woman with cancer apologizes to Rihanna for her appearance. Rihanna has the best response. appeared first on Upworthy.