In today’s Good News, an inventive teenager in Nigeria is repurposing agricultural waste, turning it into safe, biodegradable and more affordable sanitary pads. And deep under the Indian Ocean, scientists using submersibles found a gigantic, 5.3-million-year-old whale graveyard, home to species that have never before been documented.

Catherine Garcia
The Week Digital

An experimental treatment has put lupus patients into remission in a British trial. Nine patients who had not responded to previous treatments received genetically modified immune cells primed to wipe out malfunctioning cells and allow healthy ones to regrow. Within a few months, five patients were in remission. Experts said the new treatment for lupus, a chronic disease that causes the immune system to attack healthy tissue, might also help people with rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis.

AI could help doctors detect early warning signs of breast cancer up to six years before diagnosis, according to new research published in the journal Radiology. Scientists used AI-based radiology systems to study 88,963 mammograms of 31,000 patients taken over a 10-year span. Cancer prediction scores were higher, on average, for people eventually diagnosed with breast cancer. Analyzing these scores could “potentially” allow for “earlier intervention,” study co-author Fredrik Strand told Good News Network.

Chinese researchers were astonished to find “strange” undersea animals, “many believed to be new to science,” living off of millions of carcasses in a massive whale graveyard in the Indian Ocean, said CBS News. The discovery of the thriving communities of crustaceans, mollusks and bone-eating worms supports the hypothesis that whale graveyards “act as evolutionary hot spots,” the researchers reported in the journal Nature. These dynamic ecosystems give scientists a new insight into what’s happening on the dark ocean floor.

Nigerian teenager Raheema Auwal-Panti has created an environmentally friendly sanitary pad aimed at expanding access to menstrual care items in Africa. Pads can contain up to 90% plastic, and Auwaul-Panti told Mongabay she wants to “sweep up plastic pollution” in Nigeria. Her “PantiPads” are made from cassava processing waste, like peelings, which otherwise might be discarded and contaminate soil and water. PantiPads are safe and also “address menstrual stigma,” which is a “significant public health challenge” in Africa, said Auwal-Panti.

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