Good news you may have missed in 2025

At Black Earth compost near Boston, run by Andrew Brousseau, these better plastics break down, along with household food scraps, to become valuable compost for farms and gardens. This is the finished product. Black gold. And that's safe. There's no microplastics in our brain? No, that's the big advantage.

Max Senecal is an executive at CJ Biomaterials in Woburn, Massachusetts, one of several companies now making completely compostable plastics. The good news now in '25 is that we've reached a point where we can produce these at large scale. It gives you all the functionality without the guilt. Thank you, David. If we can all agree on anything, it's that we can't agree on anything. We certainly have gotten to a place where disagreement is mostly just corrosive. We need to find a way to do it better. Eli Finkel may have found it. He co-created the Center for Enlightened Disagreement at Northwestern University. So Professor, you run exercises that teach students how to disagree? Yes, exactly right. In fact, the first program involved the use of improv techniques. For example, imagine that your job is to rant for one full minute about something that makes you very, very angry. My job is to take that information and present to everybody what it is that you value-- not why you're angry, not what you're opposed to, but what is underneath the anger that you feel? And does it work? I feel very hopeful. And the students are really leaning in to this idea that to be a productive member of a multicultural society, we need to be able at least to listen and understand what the people who disagree with us believe. Is there any way this technique could be brought to a broader segment of the population? This is the goal. If we can achieve here what it looks like we're achieving, I think it won't take us long before we're able to spread this not only to other institutions of higher education, but to high schools, and perhaps even beyond. Well, on behalf of America, thank you for what you're doing. It is absolutely my pleasure. Thanks for having me. Everyone knows that birds fly south for the winter and back again in the spring, but these are not nonstop flights. They need places to stop and rest and refuel on their long journeys.

According to the Nature Conservancy's Katy Riley, California has lost at least 90% of the lakes and marshes that were once layover spots, thanks to urban growth, modern agriculture, and climate change. Her team's radical idea? Pay farmers to flood their fallow fields during migration times, creating pop up wetlands. Some birds, like the sandhill cranes we're seeing out here today, use those flooded fields, actually, to sleep. Much smaller birds, they need flooded fields to be able to feed and access little bugs in the field. So if you weren't paying farmers to flood their fields here, what would happen to those birds that are trying to migrate? They would not survive. We would see populations go down.

Ben Leacox is the general manager of Zuckerman family farms in Lodi, California. The birds benefit from this. Correct. The farmers are benefiting from this. Correct. This program may be the difference between me being in the black or the red this year. Wow. So who loses in this transaction? This is a win-win transaction for everybody.

This year, the farmers in the Bird Returns Program are offering about 50,000 acres of bird rest stops. One thing I think I would like people to take away. Sorry, a lot of geese taking off over there. You're welcome. Come back. Make sure you return.

See you next year. You might not expect to find artificial intelligence on a good news show. But in healthcare, AI is bringing enormous advances in predicting disease, discovering new drugs, and especially diagnosing illnesses. It's pretty darn good.

Robert Wachter is the chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and the author of an upcoming book about AI in medicine. He gave me a demo. Hi, GPT. I'm a physician. I have a 28-year-old patient. She's lost a bunch of weight in the last six weeks. She's tremulous, she's shaking. She's pretty sweaty, and her stools are loose. Can you give me a sense of what might be going on? Based on those symptoms, it sounds like she could be dealing with something like hyperthyroidism. Of course, you'd want to confirm that with some thyroid function tests. Great, thanks so much. But we know that regular AI sometimes just makes stuff up, wrong answers. Isn't that a risk? It can be. It is something we worry about. And it's why, at least for now, you don't want this thing diagnosing by itself. And we talk about the doctor in the loop. It's getting better every year. And I think this was the year that we turned a corner where this is going to be something of a golden era in medicine over the next five or 10 years. Thank you, Dr. Wachter-- very helpful. All right. Take it easy. Thanks so much. Well, I'm afraid that's all the time we have. We won't have time to mention how US homicides dropped almost 20% this year or how Paris cleaned up the Seine River so completely that people are now swimming in it for the first time in 100 years. Or how a British charity cleared 300,000 landmines left over from a civil war in Sri Lanka, foot by foot. It took 16 years, but 280,000 people have now returned safely home. Or how four old dams on the Klamath River in California and Oregon had cut salmon off from their traditional spawning grounds for over 100 years. But once the old dams were removed last year, the salmon returned within days. Somehow, they remembered. Have a joyous new year. And remember, bad news breaks suddenly. But good news happens everywhere all the time. Good morning, everyone. [MUSIC PLAYING]