The Rest of the World Report | June 21, 2026 — Good News Sunday Edition

Between 2020 and 2024, not one woman aged 20–24 died from cervical cancer in England. Zero. A mom and her daughter found a thousand-year-old coral on their family boat. Scientists flipped the switch on tissue regeneration that Aristotle wondered about. It's Sunday. Here's what's going right.In England, between 2020 and 2024, no women aged 20–24 died from cervical cancer — the first time that has ever happened. The HPV vaccine, introduced in schools in 2008, is estimated to have saved 200 lives so far. A generation of women will live their lives not knowing how close they came. Scientists mapped Earth's underground fungal networks for the first time. The threads stretch 110 quadrillion kilometres — nearly a billion times the distance from Earth to the Sun — and quietly absorb roughly 11% of all human carbon emissions. They are thickest not beneath forests but beneath wild grasslands. They have been there the whole time. Researchers at Texas A&M discovered that mammals never lost the ability to regenerate complex tissue. It was simply switched off. Two growth factors, applied in sequence, regrew bone, joints, ligaments, and tendons in mice after amputation. Aristotle asked why salamanders could do it and we couldn't. Now we have a first answer. Jan Pope was diving off Cairns on a family boat, doing reef surveys as a citizen scientist, when she noticed something unusual. She dropped in. "It looked like a meadow of coral. It just went on and on." She had found the largest coral colony ever documented — at least several hundred years old, possibly over a thousand — quietly thriving on the Great Barrier Reef. Jean Bennett and Albert Maguire, a married molecular biologist and surgeon, spent decades developing the first FDA-approved gene therapy for inherited blindness. They tested it on Swedish Briard dogs with the same genetic defect — and adopted them afterward. Children who had been going blind gained their independence, attended regular schools, and played outside at night."Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government." — Thomas Jefferson, 1789 Get full access to The Rest of the World Report at www.restoftheworldreport.com/subscribe