The week's good news: December 5, 2019

1. Senior neighbors join forces to write and produce their 1st album

The unexpected musical partnership between Alan Tripp, 102, and Marvin Weisbord, 88, started with a poem. Tripp and Weisbord live in the same Pennsylvania retirement community, and right before he turned 100, Tripp penned a poem about life and growing old. As a birthday present, Weisbord surprised Tripp by setting it to music. The pair enjoyed the finished product so much they decided to start working on more original songs. In September, they hit the recording studio, and in November, the duo released their 8-song album, Senior Song Book. The tunes are reminiscent of the music they listened to in the 1940s, with "lyrics telling stories about what our lives are like now," Weisbord told The Washington Post. 
They spend roughly 30 to 40 hours every week on their music. "I've never had so much fun in my life, and I never expected to be doing this in my old age," Weisbord said.

The Washington Post

2. Electric eel lights up aquarium's Christmas tree

The Tennessee Aquarium thinks people will be shocked once they learn how an electric eel named Miguel Wattson is lighting up a Christmas tree. Miguel Wattson releases low-voltage discharges when he is looking for food, and higher ones when he is eating or excited, aquarist Kimberly Hurt said. The aquarium attached sensors to his tank that are able to pick up when he produces electricity, and to celebrate the holidays, staffers connected the sensors to a strand of lights on a Christmas tree. The electricity Miguel Wattson generates is not actually turning the tree's lights on, Hurt clarified to NPR, but the sensors and other equipment are "translating when he's producing electricity to the lights." The aquarium hopes that by bringing attention to the eel, people will "be interested in these animals and interested in protecting the waters that they live in," Hurt said.

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NPR

3. Indiana family turns holiday tradition into fundraiser for cancer research

Every year, the Maiers family celebrates Thanksgiving with mimosas, delivering drinks to their neighbors. For 2019, they decided to do things a little differently — and in the process, raised $22,000 for cancer research. Nancy Maiers, 71, went through chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery earlier this year for a brain tumor, and in September, found out that it came back. Her grandson, Parker Maiers, 12, thought they should transform their Thanksgiving tradition into a fundraiser, and turned it into the Mimosa March, a one-mile walk to raise money for the National Brain Tumor Society. On Thanksgiving, more than 100 people participated in the Mimosa March, making their way through the streets of Carmel, Indiana. Each ticket was $30 and included a mimosa or plain orange juice, with extra donations welcomed. Parker Maiers told Good Morning America he wanted to honor his grandmother, a retired nurse, because she's "really nice and sweet and cares about others before herself."

Good Morning America

4. Study shows trickle-down benefits of donating cash to impoverished families

Donating cash directly to people in impoverished areas could help more than just the direct recipients, a new study shows. Economists looked at 65,000 households in an impoverished area of Kenya, where one group received no aid and the other received a one-time cash grant of $1,000. They determined that every dollar in cash aid resulted in a $2.60 increase in local economic activity, effectively benefiting the recipients directly, and those in their community indirectly. The study, published in November on the National Bureau of Economic Research website, lasted 18 months, and researchers also found that those who received cash directly spent it on essentials, like food. Edward Miguel, the study's co-author and an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, said since much of that money goes to local businesses, "they sell more. They generate more revenue. And then eventually that gets passed on into labor earnings for their workers."

University of California, Berkeley

5. Researchers find new tool in coral reef restoration: underwater speakers

Coral reefs are surprisingly noisy places, but when they are degraded, they become eerily quiet. The lack of noise deters fish populations from settling in the dying reef, scientists say, further contributing to the decline. In an effort to return life to the many reefs ravaged by climate change, researchers from the U.K. and Australia installed underwater speakers in a section of the Great Barrier Reef. They projected the sounds of a healthy reef into a dying one, and diverse fish species from across the food chain flocked to the noise. The study was published last month in Nature Communications, and revealed that ailing reefs fitted with speakers had twice as many fish compared to dying reefs where no sounds were played. "Acoustic enrichment," as the researchers are calling the method, combined with habitat restoration and conservation measures, could help accelerate the ecosystem and restore coral reefs.

University of Exeter Nature Communications