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Good News is a newsletter written by Bryan Walsh, an editorial director at Vox. He oversees the Future Perfect, tech, climate, and world teams, all of which cover stories that are both important and overlooked.

Hey readers,

Happy start to the Major League Baseball season, where in a classic bad news/good news situation, my Philadelphia Phillies somehow struck out 19 times in the season opener — and still won. Read on for:

Cat genomes! 😺

The health benefits of a hot sauna! 🧖‍♀️

Walking in Arizona (really)! 🏝

But first:

A mind-blowing image of the cosmos

NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

In a dazzling display of human ingenuity, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope captured a stunning image of a “cosmic tornado” — the ejection from a newborn star called Herbig-Haro 49/50. With breathtaking clarity, Webb revealed intricate arcs of gas, glowing in reddish-orange, and even resolved a distant spiral galaxy hiding in the background. This is more than a beautiful picture — it’s a testament to how far our technology has come. We’ve built a machine that peers 625 light-years into space and time, helping us understand how stars like our sun are born.

The main thing: Fewer children are dying than ever

a drawing of William Wordsworth, leaning his head against his hand in a gesture of weary repose

The Palmer/Getty Images

I was an English major in college, and my favorite poet was the first-generation Romantic William Wordsworth. For one thing, there’s the name, the best example of nominative determinism in the annals of English literature.

But what I most love about Wordsworth is the way he acts as a bridge between the formal, at times stultified style of the poetry that came before him, and the dawn of a new era that venerated individual emotion and experience — both the good and the ill. All that comes together in one of my favorite Wordsworth poems: “Surprised by Joy”

Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind--

But how could I forget thee? Through what power,

Even for the least division of an hour,

Have I been so beguiled as to be blind

To my most grievous loss?

Beneath the archaic language, the “thees” and so forth, the verse describes a father who is temporarily distracted from his loss by a moment of joy, only to recall with agonizing suddenness that the one person he wishes to share it with — his young child — is gone. The “surprise” in “Surprised by Joy” is that it was possible, even for the briefest moment, for the poet not to be consumed by that “most grievous loss.”

Like most of Wordsworth’s poems, “Surprised by Joy” was drawn from his personal experience — in this case, the loss of his daughter Catherine in 1812, when she was just three years old. Wordsworth and his wife Mary had five children, two of whom died young: Catherine, and their son Thomas, who passed away from measles at age 6, just a half year after Catherine’s death.

To lose two young children in less than a calendar year is a grief I cannot fathom. But it was unbearably common at the time. Nearly one in every three children in England in 1800 died before the age of 5. In 1900 in the US, the death rate for children was nearly one in five, as my Vox colleague Anna North wrote recently. Look back over the full course of human history, and it is estimated that nearly one in every two children died before reaching their 15th birthday.

It might be comforting, perhaps, to pretend that the parents of the past weren’t as affected with the death of a child, because it was so common. After all, family sizes used to be much larger, in part because of the ubiquity of childhood mortality.

Yet Wordsworth’s lines bury that comfort in the graveyard where it belongs. In 2025, in 1812, in 2000 BC, the death of a young child is the worst thing that could happen to any parent.

This chart shows life

You’re probably wondering, “Where’s the good news?” Here it is: The rate of childhood mortality is now far, far lower than it once was. Best of all, it’s continuing to drop.

In 1990, 12.8 million children died before the age of 5, but in the years since that number has fallen by more than 60 percent. According to new data released by the UN this week, the number of under-5 deaths fell to a record-low of 4.8 million in 2023.

Person wearing a mask walking through an area with tons of white flags.

At Vox’s Future Perfect, the section I run, we like to refer to the drastic drop in child mortality as the most important statistic in the world, for several reasons:

If a child can make it to their fifth birthday, it significantly increases their chance of living a full life. Given that life expectancy overall has increased hugely as well, that can mean the difference between a life of a few years and one that extends to 70 years or more. With millions of children alive today who would have been dead just a few decades ago, that adds up to billions of years of additional life.

Child mortality is one of the most important indicators of a country’s development. As the chart above shows, rich nations like the UK and the US first made progress in keeping children alive, but more recently poorer nations like India have made tremendous strides. (Child mortality dropped an astounding 81 percent between 1980 and today in India.)

The reduction in child mortality is perhaps the best example of the international community setting a goal and making major progress toward it. In 2000, the UN aimed to reduce child mortality to two-thirds below 1990 levels by 2015. While we didn’t quite make it by then, we’re almost there now. Global health is a bright spot compared to the struggles in making progress on climate change.

We shouldn’t need economic motivations to want to reduce child deaths, but reduced childhood mortality is also associated with better economic performance. Family sizes fall to a more manageable level in poor countries, and more future workers survive to a productive age.

How did we get here — and where are we going?

Getty Images

There is no secret formula to reducing child mortality. Improved prenatal, childbirth, and postnatal care all keep children alive in their vulnerable first months. Better sanitation and nutrition prevent early deaths from waterborne illnesses and malnutrition.

Vaccines have, of course, saved untold millions of children from once common killers like measles, diphtheria and polio. (Let me say this again louder for those in the back row, especially if any of you happen to currently be running the Department of Health and Human Services: VACCINES!)

Despite this tremendous success, 4.8 million children — approximately the population of Phoenix — still die before their fifth birthday, which is exactly 4.8 million too many. The world would have to reduce child mortality by an additional 30 percent or so to meet the new UN goal of essentially ending preventable child deaths 2030.

Unfortunately, we’re not on that trajectory. While the number of child deaths is still declining, progress has been slowing down, and that was before the massive cuts in foreign aid in the US and other countries. The highest levels of child mortality today are found in extremely poor sub-Saharan African nations like Chad and Mali where aid will be the difference between life and death.

Here in the US, the turn away from childhood vaccines risks reintroducing long-conquered killers of children. The fact that an unvaccinated child in Texas recently died of the measles — the same disease that took Wordsworth’s son Thomas, back when there was no protection from the virus — should horrify all of us.

Whether it is through resurrecting the most effective forms of foreign aid, or reconfirming our trust in vaccines that have saved millions, it is in our power to eventually end preventable child deaths. We can ensure that one day no parent will experience the pain suffered by William Wordsworth and by countless parents before and after him. Such an achievement would be a joy that lasts.

Progress, charted 📈

Our World in Data

One of the greatest demonstrations of scientific progress has been the astounding reduction in the cost of sequencing a full human genome — the genetic blueprint for human development.

What once cost $100 million can now be done for a little more than the price of a PlayStation 5 console. Genome sequencing has unlocked personalized medicine, faster disease diagnosis, targeted cancer treatments, rare disease discoveries, and groundbreaking research. It could transform health care and improve countless lives worldwide.

Earlier this year scientists in Uganda identified an Ebola outbreak strain in just 24 hours — what they called a genomic “world speed record,” according to a story last week in Nature. This milestone reveals how cheap sequencing could revolutionize outbreak responses in the regions that need it most.

Difference makers🤩

Our World in Data

This past week marked the 111th anniversary of the birth of Norman Borlaug, an American scientist whose accomplishments should be far better known.

The agronomist behind the Green Revolution, Borlaug is credited with saving over a billion lives through innovations in high-yield, disease-resistant wheat. His groundbreaking research significantly increased food production, overhauling agriculture worldwide and vastly reducing famine in the second half of the 20th century. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, and Borlaug’s legacy demonstrates how scientific innovation, compassion, and perseverance can profoundly improve human life and global stability.

The good number 💯

Diego Mallo for Vox

73 percent

That’s the reduction in the number of suicides on San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, since staineless steel netting was installed on both sides of the bridge in 2023, according to a new study. The news reminded me of a haunting New Yorker story from 2003 about the people who had survived a jump off the bridge. One quote has stuck with me: “I instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable — except for having just jumped.” These nets are ensuring more people will survive that moment.

Study this 👩‍🔬

A man sit sin a sauna, suspiciously not sweaty

Getty Images

Do you like shutting yourself in a box and raising the temperature to above 155 F? If so, you are not like me — personally I think saunas sound like a violation of the Geneva Convention.

But new research suggests I’m missing out.

According to a large study published in JAMA, there was a 40 percent reduction in all-cause mortality among those who sauna-bathed four to seven times a week — which, wow! — compared to those who did it once a week. Another study in the journal Age and Aging looked at the same participants and found a 66 percent risk reduction in developing Alzheimer’s or dementia.

The theory is that the heat exposure in a sauna can trigger a protective stress response called hormesis. The heat also causes your heart to pump more blood, which can mimic the positive effects of a cardio workout. Is that enough for me to purposefully sit and sweat? We’ll see. (I really, really hate being hot.)

A hat tip here to the great Atria Health newsletter, where I originally read about these studies. It’s run by my brilliant wife Siobhan O’Connor and features all the latest on the science of longevity. You can sign up for it here.

Short hits 💥

A bus drives past a modern apartment building

Rebecca Noble/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Speaking of heat: Tempe, Arizona, where the summer temperatures regularly top out above 100 F, seems like the last place you’d want to go without a car. But as the New York Times wrote this week, the residents of Culdesac Tempe live in the first neighborhood in the US designed to be free of cars. Residents get around on a light-rail system, bikes, scooters — and they even walk. That also might be a first in Arizona.
Scientists behind the project Darwin’s Cats are working to sequence the genomes of as many as 100,000 different felines, in an effort to create the world’s largest cat genetic database. I plan to sign up to sequence our pet cat Bitsy, in the hopes that I’ll finally discover the genetic reason behind why she insists on walking through all our food.
NASA’s Curiosity rover has discovered long-chain fatty molecules that could be microbial leftovers from a bygone lake. Those could represent evidence of microbes in the past. So yes, David Bowie, there might have once been life on Maaaaaaaaars.
If, like me, you intend to take in a ball game or two in person this season, check out Quartz’s roundup of the newest in MLB cuisine. The best: San Francisco’s Buffalo Bacon Ranch Pretzel. The worst, as much as it pains me to say: Philadelphia’s horrifying S’mores Quesadilla, which looks like it was actually prepared by the Phillie Phanatic.

📲 Did I miss any good news? Share story ideas and feedback to bryan.walsh@vox.com. For additional thoughts, follow me on X and don't forget to check out the latest from Future Perfect.

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