It wasn’t all bad
■ If you find yourself in Colorado Springs, be prepared to run into a 6-foot-tall, 100-pound pet emu. Since 2021, Billie-Sue Mitchell has been taking Dennis, her pet emu, on walks around town. Mitchell got him to safeguard her family’s chickens and ducks from predators, and he started following her while she was walking her dog Blue. She ended up putting a harness and a leash on Dennis and started taking him around her property, but they eventually ventured out to the city. “I’ve met so many people from all over the world who want to get their picture taken with him,” she said.
■ When a restaurant in her San Jose neighborhood went up in flames, seventh-grader Shanya Gill started thinking about how to prevent fires. She knew the building had smoke detectors, but by the time those went off, it was too late. “It hit close to my heart because it was part of my community,” Shanya, 12, says. So, Shanya worked on ways to see the danger earlier. Using a simple computer, a thermal-imaging camera, and the programming language Python, Shanya created a system that could detect if a burner was left unattended for 10 minutes and send out a warning. Shanya was awarded the top prize in the Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge, the culmination of a science contest that starts with 65,000 middle schoolers.
■ Every year since 1999, Chris Farley, owner of Washington, D.C.’s Pacers Running stores, had completed a marathon race in less than three hours. This year, however, he was left disappointed when his streak ended at the New York City Marathon with a time of 3 hours 4 minutes and 3 seconds. But his friends and family won’t let him quit. So, Farley is planning to run in Tucson’s marathon in December. And if that doesn’t work, he might repeat the last-ditch maneuver from the one other time he broke his streak, in 2017: The Pacers team staged its own 26.2-mile run in D.C., at a U.S. Track & Field–certified marathon course.