A Walk Home, Plant-Sniffing Dogs and an App That Listens

Three today that made me smile for different reasons, a man finally walking up to his mum's gate after 28 years, dogs turning their daily walks into conservation work and a teenager who built an app by paying close attention to his cousin.

Karl Bushby, a former paratrooper from Hull, set off in 1998 to walk around the world and come home entirely on foot, and he's finally done it. That's about 31,000 miles through around 30 countries, including crossing the frozen Bering Strait on foot in 2006, swimming more than 170 miles across the Caspian Sea and then swimming the Channel last month because his rules don't allow ferries. Hundreds of people met him in Hull and then he pushed his cart the last three miles to his mum Angela's house, where he told her she'd changed a bit and she said she was older, which is the best reunion line I've heard in ages !

Source: Good News Network, Adventurer Finally Hugs Mom After 28-Year Walk Around the World From Home in UK

Scientists at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig trained 31 volunteer dogs and their owners between 2021 and 2023 to sniff out invasive plants like Himalayan balsam, common ragweed and Japanese knotweed. Twelve teams made it to the final field test and 11 of them passed, with an average detection rate of 75%, and the study is out in PLOS One. I love the idea that a normal dog walk can turn into spotting a problem plant early, before it takes over a whole riverbank.

Source: Good News Network, Dogs Can Sniff-Out Invasive Plant Species With High Accuracy to Curb Their Destruction

Shashank Madala is a high school student in New Jersey who taught himself machine learning at 15 to build Kora, a free app that helps parents and carers read the emotional cues of autistic children. You point your phone at the child and it shows a few possible readings like happy, sad or afraid with ideas for how to respond, and it says when it isn't sure so the adult who knows the child makes the final call. It started because he watched his family guess wrong about his younger cousin, it's now used by more than 700 people in 12 countries and it won the Congressional App Challenge in his district, which is a brilliant thing to come out of paying attention to one person.

Source: Good News Network, Interpreting Autistic Cues Is Difficult, a Teen Built an App That's Helping Hundreds of Families