The week's good news: December 3, 2020

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1. Using his drone, New York man finds dog lost for 10 days in the woods
2. Canadian community comes together to rescue a neighborhood bar
3. After beating COVID-19, patient finds and thanks all 116 health-care workers who saved his life
4. Delivery driver surprises basketball-loving brothers with a new hoop
5. Chess-playing AI network solves 50-year-old biological dilemma, potentially revolutionizing drug development

published 3 December 2020

1. Using his drone, New York man finds dog lost for 10 days in the woods

After seeing a flyer about a missing golden retriever named Meadow, Brian James knew that if he used his drone to fly over the spot where the puppy was last seen, he had a chance of finding her. "Everybody's got the capability to help," he told World News Tonight. "You never know what will come of it." James headed to the woods in Andes, New York, and flew his drone up above the trees, looking closely at the images being captured by the device. He zoomed in on a patch of white, and saw that it was a dog. He ran to the area, and was greeted by Meadow, who was thrilled to see him after 10 days on her own. Meadow was reunited with her owners, Gary and Debbie Morgan, right before Thanksgiving, and Debbie told World News Tonight they were "just so grateful for Brian" for finding their pup.

When Abra Shiner put out a call for help, it didn't take long for customers and complete strangers to show up. Shiner owns the Swan Dive, a bar in Toronto's Brockton Village neighborhood. Because of the pandemic, the bar had to pivot to selling craft beer via curbside pickup and delivery, and it wasn't enough to cover the bills. Shiner posted on Facebook that it didn't look like the Swan Dive would be able to stay open, but before closing, she wanted to sell as much beer as possible so it wouldn't go to waste. Almost immediately, "people just started coming out of the woodwork," Shiner told CTV. About 25 percent of the buyers were regulars, and the rest were members of the "amazing" local community, Shiner said. Almost every case of beer was purchased, and Shiner said because of this support, she can cover the rent for several months.

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When Jeff Gerson learned how many people provided care to him while he was hospitalized with COVID-19, the Manhattan resident wanted to thank each and every one of them. Gerson was admitted to NYU Langone Tisch Hospital in mid-March; he spent a month on a ventilator and was able to go home in May. After going through his hospital and insurance records, he discovered 116 doctors, nurses, therapists, and other health-care workers helped save his life. "I just wanted to thank everybody," Gerson told the New York Daily News. Over the next five months, he worked on gathering contact information, and on Nov. 10, sent a letter expressing his gratitude. Dr. Luis Angel told the Daily News it was "incredible" to hear from Gerson, and he appreciated that his former patient thanked each person who had a role in his recovery. Gerson's survival, Angel said, is "a credit to everyone."

Elijah and Zachary Wheeler enjoy basketball so much it didn't bother them that their hoop was broken — they played anyway. The Ohio brothers had no idea that Aubrey, a delivery driver with FedEx, saw them playing all the time and decided to surprise the family with a brand new hoop, leaving the gift, along with a basketball, on their front porch. "This was just such a blessing for her to do this, and I never ever expected it," the boys' mother, Coledo Wheeler, told Good Morning America. "It really was a total shock." Elijah now spends every morning before school shooting hoops, and the Wheeler family is looking forward to the next time Aubrey is in the neighborhood, so they can let her know in person how much her gift meant to them. "This was definitely something that was special, and it was inspiring," Coledo said.

On Monday, DeepMind revealed its AI system AlphaFold had cracked a 50-year-old biological challenge, accurately predicting how proteins within the human body fold into 3D shapes based on their DNA sequences. Those shapes are key in determining how a protein works, and thus pivotal to figuring out how to treat diseases that involve those proteins. It takes about a year and costs around $120,000 to identify a single protein's shape using the most common method, X-ray crystallography, Fortune reports. DeepMind had AlphaFold study 170,000 protein sequences and shapes that had already been identified, and after a few weeks, AlphaFold was ready to face off against other computer-based protein structure predictors in an international competition called CASP. When asked to extrapolate 100 protein shapes from their amino acid sequences, AlphaFold beat out every other program and produced results that rivaled lab methods. CASP co-founder John Moult told Nature AlphaFold's results are a "big deal."

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.