Hey there, welcome.
This is CNN 5 Good Things, your weekly palate cleanser.
I'm Christa Vo Polanco.
Let's jump right in.
There is hope.
You know, it's not a death sentence.
I'm living proof that you could come back 100%.
This woman is now cancer-free from one of the deadliest forms of the disease, thanks to a potentially game-changing treatment.
Plus, you can eat it, you can use it as fertilizer, and now this natural resource is being used as an alternative to plastic.
Then we head over to the soccer pitch to celebrate a trailblazer for the sport.
And later on?
I'm so glad they did it that way.
I don't think any of us would have had it any other way.
A high school in Oklahoma found a sweet way to thank the person who saved them from a school shooting.
When we come back... The boys just need somewhere where it's cool to do the right thing.
A young dad is stepping up for the boys in his community.
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You know the phrase, it takes a village to raise a child.
King Randall certainly knows that growing up in Albany, Georgia.
His family members taught him everything from fixing cars to the importance of a firm handshake.
But he noticed a lot of boys in his neighborhood weren't getting that same guidance.
And so to see these kids not knowing basic stuff that I would feel like is basic, seeing them not know it was a big problem for me.
And so that's why I decided to want to be a solution.
So in 2019, at 19 years old, he started a mentorship program called X for Boys out of his dining room with a dry erase board and a dream.
We focus on creating a well-rounded young man, so when he goes out into the world, there's not a whole lot that he doesn't know.
A man that knows how to speak, a man that knows how to protect, a man that knows how to provide and a man that's confident.
The only way you create a confident man is putting him in scenarios and also creating routines.
The 26-year-old father of four, is focused on teaching young boys all kinds of hard and soft skills, like how to manage money order at a restaurant, book appointments, pump gas and grocery shop.
All right, cool.
So we got milk, chicken breasts, apples, paper towels.
We want to make sure as we go down the list, we're checking things off, okay?
You understand that?
Yeah.
He's racked up hundreds of thousands of views on Instagram and TikTok for his Boys Should Know life skill videos.
They show kids how to fix problems like an overflowing toilet.
We've got a big problem here, don't we?
Yes, sir.
So this could be an expensive problem or it could be a quick, easy fix where we could just mop and get this stuff out the toilet.
Good to go?
Yes, sir.
And how to conduct themselves.
This video is called Boys Should Know, Nice Doesn't Mean Yes.
Just because you give somebody something or because you're nice to them, that does not mean that they owe you something.
You understand that?
Yes, sir.
Why can't she say no?
Because this is her body.
Say it again.
Because this is her body.
This is her body.
We do not own anyone.
You understand that?
The program is completely free for families and runs after school and during the summer for kids ages seven and up.
King says some of his former students have gone on to join the military, become mechanics and head off to college, with many of them coming back to mentor the next group of boys.
The boys just need somewhere where it's cool to do the right thing.
Our mission is to create protectors and providers, not just their family, but for the community.
If you want to support their work, head to thexforboys.org.
The link is also in our show notes.
There is hope.
You know, it's not a death sentence.
I'm living proof that you could come back 100%.
A groundbreaking new treatment is showing promise in the fight against one of the deadliest cancers.
Pancreatic cancer has been one of the most challenging cancers to treat.
90% of patients die within five years of diagnosis with current treatments.
Dr Vinod Balachandran is a surgical oncologist with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
He led a small clinical trial testing to see if a personalized MNRA vaccine could fight pancreatic cancer.
And the results are pretty amazing.
Could you even teach the immune system to make a really strong immune response against pancreatic cancer, one of the most challenging cancers in oncology?
And what we're finding is that you can, and when you do, Patients live longer.
Of the 16 patients who received it after pancreatic surgery along with chemotherapy and an immunotherapy drug.
He says half of those patients showed positive immune responses to the vaccine.
And nearly 90% of them were still alive four to six years later, including Donna Gustafson.
Statistically, I knew the odds were so against me.
So anything that was going to give me even a little bit more hope, I was very willing to try.
Many people get diagnosed and do not survive the first year.
And only 13% make five years.
The 72-year-old grandmother from Delray Beach Florida, became the first patient in the world to receive the personalized MNRA vaccine built from her own tumor.
Six years later, I'm 100% cancer-free.
My husband and I just celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary.
I got to see two more of my grandchildren be born.
We've traveled extensively.
And six more years just to be here and love everyone.
It's wonderful.
And of course, this needs to be tested in larger trials, and we have larger trials ongoing.
The hope is that if we can use it to treat pancreatic cancer, perhaps this could provide a blueprint to now treat others similar to very challenging cancer.
So that's exciting times ahead.
What if the answer to our plastic problem has been floating in the ocean this whole time?
A company in Wales called Plant C is turning seaweed into a biodegradable alternative to single-use plastic.
There's over 400 million tonnes of plastic being produced every year and it's everywhere.
It's in our daily lives.
You can't go to the supermarket without seeing it.
And I was just a very frustrated consumer when we started Plancy.
I was trying to remove plastic from my life.
That's co-founder and CEO Rhiannon Reese.
She started Plancy in 2020 during lockdown and landed on seaweed as a plastic alternative because it's a free natural resource.
The seaweed actually... lends itself very well to material innovation.
It has a very rich chemical structure.
It's full of sugars and polysaccharides, so it lends itself very well to biomaterials.
Plancy is using that natural material to create plastic-free components to everyday items like laundry detergent pods, caps and bottles for beauty products, food packaging and more.
Take laundry pods.
Reese says the ones you typically buy are made from a synthetic polymer, which is petroleum-based.
Now, while they do dissolve, they don't ever really truly disappear.
They create liquid microplastics.
We know that these liquid microplastics attract toxins and heavy metals, and they're actually very difficult to clean out of our drinking water.
Reese says Plant C's polymer fully dissolves and doesn't leave behind any microplastics.
They're already working with major brands.
The potential is huge.
So many other opportunities in other applications like cosmetics, even food, pharmaceutical agriculture.
We could be replacing billions of capsules just in Europe.
That's a really exciting number that I hope that we can achieve.
Football goddess.
That's what thousands of soccer fans in Berlin were chanting to mark the smashing of a glass ceiling.
Marie-Louise Etta made history last week by becoming the first woman to coach a professional men's soccer team in any of Europe's top five leagues.
The 34-year-old was named interim manager of the Union Berlin Football Club in the Bundesliga League.
I know that this holds great significance and certainly sends a signal to the world as well.
My focus here, quite simply, is on doing the best possible job.
Her first foray on the football pitch ended with a loss, but her appointment has been widely celebrated across the soccer world.
Even so, it doesn't mean she's immune to any hate, sexism, or misogyny from online trolls.
Behavior of the club has been calling out with responses like no worries for you, then she only coaches professional footballers, not sexist trolls.
When CNN asked how she's dealing with the haters, here's what she said.
I focus on what I can influence here, and that's working with the lads on the pitch.
The day-to-day football content.
It simply comes down to staying focused and concentrating on the task at hand.
And that's exactly what we do every day.
Her appointment is only temporary, since she's due to take over the women's squad at Union Berlin next season.
But as the founder of Germany's most popular soccer magazine, Eleven Friends, puts it, anything can happen.
If she does well, the fans might want her to stick around.
Coming up...
If it wasn't for the actions of the principal and the staff, I don't know what other outcome we had.
So we're very, very proud of them.
The school did an excellent job.
To honor his bravery, students made a tribute their principal won't forget.
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Are you having a good time, Paul's Valley?
Students at Pauls Valley High School in Oklahoma usually don't crown a prom king and queen.
Are you guys ready to crown the king and the queen?
But they told CNN affiliate KTEN they made an exception this year.
Just days after an attempted school shooting, they chose to honor the man who saved lives.
Ladies and gentlemen, our kid, Kurt Moore.
Oh, my God.
It was ecstatic.
And they're like, we win it.
I'm so glad they did it that way.
I don't think any of us would have had it any other way.
The kids were so excited.
They were cheering him on.
And he was just grinning ear to ear.
And they put the crown on him.
You thought he won a million dollars.
Kirk Moore is the school's principal.
His students surprised him with the title just 10 days after he was shot and wounded while stopping a gunman on campus.
School officials are calling Principal Moore a hero for tackling a 20-year-old former student who entered the school with a gun.
School surveillance video shows Moore wrestling the man before another teacher grabbed the firearm.
Moore was shot in the leg, taken to a hospital, and has since recovered.
If it wasn't for the actions of the principal and the staff, I don't know what other outcome we had.
So we're very, very proud of them.
The school did an excellent job.
I thought he was truly a hero.
Good Lord above was watching over everybody that day, and I'm so thankful that it turned out the way it did.
All right, that's all for now.
Thank you so much for listening.
I hope you enjoyed the show.
And if you did, send it to a friend so they can too.
And there's more goodness where that came from if you sign up for the CNN 5 Good Things newsletter.
The link to subscribe and the links we talked about today are in the show notes.
And join us tomorrow for the next edition of CNN One Thing.
Elon Musk and Sam Altman are taking their feud to court next week in a trial about OpenAI's for-profit model.
That could shift the course of the AI race.
Have a good day.
Till next time.
I'm CNN tech reporter Claire Duffy.
This week on the podcast, Terms of Service.
What do we know about how much AI is contributing to energy consumption, energy demand right now?
And how does that compare with other industries?
The best resource for that is the International Energy Agency, which is sort of the global energy think tank that collects data on all of this.
And what they predict is that about 8 of the additional electricity that we're going to need by 2030 that will be for data centres.
The other 92% is for other things, industry electrification, electric vehicles...
And AI is really only driving part of that increase in demand.
