The week's good news: June 22, 2023

1. This intergenerational orchestra is striking the right chord

The goal of the Heart of Los Angeles (HOLA) Eisner Intergenerational Orchestra is simple: to bridge cultural and generational gaps in this sprawling city. Launched in 2021, the orchestra has over 70 members, from teenagers to senior citizens, meaning high school cellists perform next to retired bass players. Maestro Daniel Suk told the Los Angeles Times there is "an absolute crisis," with seniors who are "just so lonely and a younger generation that has no connection to them." The orchestra has changed this; older musicians mentor the younger performers, while the teens help their new friends figure out how to download the app Suk uses to communicate with members. Violinist Gerston Galdamez, 27, has a doctorate in gerontology, and wants to see society change how it views aging and the elderly. "The arts are really the way to do it," he told the Times, and the orchestra is "a canvas for connections."

Los Angeles Times

2. Blue whales are making a comeback in California waters

More and more blue whales are being spotted off the coast of California — a welcome sight, as these massive mammals (the largest animals on Earth) remain endangered after nearly being hunted to extinction. When the International Whaling Commission banned their hunting in the mid-1960s, it was estimated that just 600 blue whales were left. To get the population back up, the U.S. enacted restrictions on fishing gear and implemented shipping lanes to keep ships away from whales. A 2014 study from the University of Washington found that California blue whales were the only population to recover from whaling, and today, it's estimated there are 1,900 to 2,200 blue whales around Southern California. Jennie Dean, vice president of education and conservation at the Aquarium of the Pacific, told KTLA it's "not just one entity that is contributing to the success of the populations rebounding; it's really the efforts of everyone."

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KTLA

3. Scientists reveal they have determined how Huntington's disease begins

Scientists who studied Huntington's disease, a rare inherited brain disorder that causes neurons to break down over time and die, shared in a new report that they have determined the initial event that leads to its formation. Huntington's disease happens when proteins fold into an abnormal shape and start clumping together, causing a domino effect with other nearby proteins. "As the disease progresses, you're effectively watching a sort of forest fire," study author Randal Halfmann, a researcher at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City, Missouri, told NPR. "And you're trying to figure out what started it." The scientists created hundreds of versions of PolyQ, a protein segment that is toxic in Huntington's disease, and after conducting experiments with PolyQ inside individual cells, identified the molecule that "starts this little forest fire in the brain," Halfmann said. They found that in the lab, they could stop the molecule from spreading by flooding the cell with proteins. Now, Halfmann said, the next step is to create a drug that can do something similar in humans.

NPR eLife

4. Study: Most early-stage breast cancer patients become long-term survivors

In the last 20 years, the prognosis has improved considerably for women who are diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer, according to a new study from the University of Oxford. Researchers tracked the survival rates of 500,000 women diagnosed with breast cancer in England between 1993 and 2015, and found that today, patients diagnosed early are 66% less likely to die from the disease than they were 20 years ago. The risk of death from breast cancer is the highest five years after a diagnosis, the researchers said, and the rate was 14.4 percent for women diagnosed between 1993 and 1999. That number dropped to 4.9 percent for women diagnosed between 2010 and 2015. The scientists published their study in the journal BMJ, and wrote that because the prognosis has "improved substantially since the 1990s, most can expect to be long-term cancer survivors."

The Guardian BMJ

5. UN passes first-ever high seas treaty protecting marine life

The United Nations has adopted its first-ever high-seas treaty, which it said forges "a common wave of conservation and sustainability in the high seas beyond national boundaries." The Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction Treaty (BBNJ) is legally binding and was signed by the 193 U.N. member states "to prevent a cascading of species extinctions," U.N. Secretary-General's Special Envoy for the Oceans Peter Thomson told CBS News. Approximately two-thirds of the ocean is considered international waters, and the treaty comes just one year after COP15, the U.N. Biodiversity Conference, agreed to put "30% of the planet and 30% of degraded ecosystems under protection by 2030," through the Global Biodiversity Framework. "To reach that target, we'll have to establish Marine Protected Areas in the High Seas, and happily the BBNJ Treaty will give us the legal means to do that," Thomson said.

CBS News