The week's good news: October 29, 2020

1. Man donates 25,000 baseball cards to girl who lost her collection in a fire

When Kevin Ashford heard about a nine-year-old girl whose baseball card collection was destroyed in a fire, he knew exactly what to do with the more than 25,000 cards that he had acquired over the last two decades. Reese Osterberg lives in Fresno County, California, and has been playing baseball since she was in preschool. She began collecting baseball cards about three years ago, and all 100 of them were lost when the Creek Fire burned down her family's home. When local firefighters learned that her cards had been ruined, they asked the community to help her start a new collection. Ashford told ABC7 he had thought about selling his cards online, but is glad he held onto them so they could go to Osterberg and her friends. "It's just one thing after another that's been happening here during 2020, and I just want to make it a little easier for these kids," he said.

ABC 7 Bay Area

2. Scientists discover a massive coral reef in Australia's Great Barrier Reef

Australian scientists working to map the seafloor around the northern Great Barrier Reef made a major discovery earlier this month, finding a 1,600-foot-tall detached coral reef. This is the first newfound reef in 120 years, NBC News reports. It is taller than the Empire State Building and almost a mile wide at its base. The reef is off the coast of North Queensland, and researchers from the Schmidt Ocean Institute first observed it on Oct. 20. On Sunday, an underwater robot was dispatched to take measurements and explore the reef. Marine geologist Robin Beaman, who is leading the expedition, said the team is "surprised and elated by what we have found." They will continue to explore the area until Nov. 17, and the underwater imagery being captured and mapping data being collected will help people understand this new reef's role within the Great Barrier Reef.

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NBC News

3. One dad's amateur pet drawings raise $15,000 for charity

You won't see his art hanging in a museum, but Phil Heckels' drawings of family pets are bringing joy to his friends — and raising money for a good cause. Heckels lives in England, and last month asked his son to make a thank you card. He worked on his own piece of art, drawing their dog, and posted a picture of it on Facebook, joking that it was available to buy for just £299 (about $390). Heckles, who works in commercial real estate, was shocked when seven friends asked him to sketch their pets. Word spread and more requests started coming in, and Heckels told CNN he does "genuinely try quite hard to draw them" while also "having a laugh with it. People seem to be enjoying it and I'm certainly enjoying it." Instead of paying him, clients make donations to Turning Tides, a charity that helps the homeless. Heckels has finished 220 portraits and raised $15,000 for the organization.

CNN

4. Young aspiring paleontologist finds 69-million-year-old fossil

While exploring Horseshoe Canyon in Alberta this summer, Nathan Hrushkin, 12, made a discovery that thrilled the aspiring paleontologist: He found the bones of a 69-million-year-old dinosaur. Nathan was hiking with his dad, Dion, when he came across the bones. They took photos and sent them to the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology, which dispatched a team to look for more fossils. Between 30 and 50 bones were found, including a partial skull, and the experts determined they all belonged to the same hadrosaur, which was about three or four years old. Francois Therrien, curator of dinosaur paleoecology at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology, said that this "young hadrosaur is a very important discovery because it comes from a time interval for which we know very little about what kind of dinosaurs or animals lived in Alberta. Nathan and Dion's find will help us fill this big gap in our knowledge of dinosaur evolution."

People

5. NASA confirms water on the moon's sunlit surface for the 1st time

NASA on Monday announced that scientists have confirmed there is water on the sunlit surface of the moon. The agency revealed that its Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy detected water molecules in the moon's southern hemisphere, and explained that scientists had previously observed "some form of hydrogen" on the moon's surface, but they couldn't "definitively distinguish" between water and hydroxyl. "We had indications that H2O — the familiar water we know — might be present on the sunlit side of the moon," Paul Hertz, director of NASA Headquarters's Astrophysics Division in the Science Mission Directorate, said in a statement. "Now we know it is there." This suggests "water may be distributed across the lunar surface, and not limited to cold, shadowed places," NASA said, and it also "raises new questions about how water is created and how it persists on the harsh, airless lunar surface."

NASA