In honor of National Volunteer Week, GOOD will be bringing you a daily recommendation about organizations with which you can volunteer in your neighborhood and around the country.I don’t know about you, but for my money, there’s nothing better than a healthy dose of NPR to remedy the discomfort of a traffic-heavy morning commute. On the bad days, it can take as long as 30 minutes to travel the five miles from my house to the office, but that time flies by when it’s passed in the company of a public radio newscaster.Of course, as you’re well aware, NPR isn’t exactly a cash cow. But making a donation during a pledge drive isn’t the only way for you to support your local radio affiliate. By visiting the volunteer section of NPR’s website, you can find action opportunities at your local station. Once you’ve filled out a volunteer application (.doc), you might find yourself hosting a community event at the facility, staffing a reception desk, answering phone calls, helping to sort mail, or facilitating the donations of listeners like you.While it might not sound glamorous, it is, indeed, the sort of hero’s work that allows a venerable media institution to inform and educate the public. By participating, you can take pride in knowing that you play a vital role in making that possible. And, if nothing else, it’s worth it to catch a glimpse of the face behind the disembodied voice of your favorite radio anchor. Photo by Flickr user tvol.
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Goodbye, knee pain. In a medical first, scientists have found a way to regrow damaged cartilage.
“Our new therapy can induce repair in a tissue that does not naturally regenerate.”
Science might be closer than ever to solving your aching knee problems. Researchers at Northwestern University have created a rubbery goo that can regrow cartilage in damaged knees.
Cartilage cushions joints, keeps movement smooth and pain-free, and reduces pressure on bones—from standing still to a vigorous hike. However, when it’s damaged by injury or simple wear and tear, the road to recovery can be extremely challenging. Cartilage has a very limited ability to regrow and heal itself.
A doctor examines a knee.
Photo credit: CanvaRegrowing cartilage with a rubbery goo
This breakthrough bioactive material doesn’t just passively sit in the body, it binds to and integrates with surrounding tissue, promoting cartilage regeneration. The substance forms a network of components that imitate the body’s natural environment. A scaffold-like structure allows cells to connect and rebuild cartilage tissue.
“The problem is that, in adult humans, cartilage does not have an inherent ability to heal,” said Samuel I. Stupp, who led the study. “Our new therapy can induce repair in a tissue that does not naturally regenerate. We think our treatment could help address a serious, unmet clinical need.”
Damaged cartilage stained red.
Photo credit: Samuel I. Stupp/Northwestern UniversityBioactive material regenerates high-quality cartilage
In the study, Stupp and his team applied the material to damaged cartilage in sheep. These animals have weight-bearing loads comparable to human knees.
The biomaterial, made from short protein fragments and a modified version of hyaluronic acid, behaves similarly to naturally occurring cartilage in the body. Stupp explained the reasoning behind using hyaluronic acid, saying, “It’s also naturally found in many tissues throughout the human body, including the joints and brain. We chose it because it resembles the natural polymers found in cartilage.”
After fewer than six months, the new cartilage showed high-quality regeneration and strong indications that the repair could work in humans.
Treated cartilage stained red shows repair.
Photo credit: Samuel I. Stupp/Northwestern UniversityLimited solutions to damaged knees
Cartilage damage is unfortunately very common, affecting more than 500 million people worldwide. For decades, the message has been discouraging: once cartilage is damaged or disappears, it’s gone for good.
A 2025 study found that current treatments, such as surgery, cell implants, and microfracture, may help in the short term but often produce weaker cartilage soon after. Failure rates for microfracture surgery have led to as many as 41% of patients requiring total knee replacement. Finding reliable, long-lasting solutions is still a work in progress.
A 2025 study on cartilage repair found that, although many people felt better after surgery, up to 48% developed arthritis over time. Only 17–20% returned to playing sports, and some required additional surgeries, including knee replacement.
A woman practices yoga.
Photo credit: CanvaStudy hopes to change the standard of care
Researchers believe the bioactive material could be used in most joint surgeries. With these promising findings, the goo-like substance could one day make a meaningful difference for anyone hoping to move without pain again.
“By regenerating hyaline cartilage, our approach should be more resistant to wear and tear, fixing the problem of poor mobility and joint pain for the long term while also avoiding the need for joint reconstruction with large pieces of hardware,” Stupp said.
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Catherine O’Hara’s tear-jerking eulogy for John Candy was a master class in memorializing a true friend
Now that O’Hara has also passed, the beautiful words she spoke for Candy resonate in a new and painful way.
The comedy world lost two of its great lights decades apart. John Candy in 1994, and Catherine O’Hara on January 30, 2026. But O’Hara left something behind from that first loss: a nine-minute eulogy that remains one of the most moving tributes one friend has ever paid another.
Candy was the big-hearted comic-actor best known for his string of charismatic film roles in the 1980s and early 1990s, from Stripes to Planes, Trains, and Automobiles to Uncle Buck. He died at just 43 in 1994, following a heart attack. O’Hara, his close friend and collaborator from SCTV, Second City Toronto, and Home Alone, delivered the eulogy at his memorial service in Toronto, and in nine minutes she managed to capture everything that made him irreplaceable.
She opened the beautiful eulogy by summarizing all of the ways he “enriched” other people’s worlds, including so many small acts of kindness.
“I know you all have a story,” she says in the clip. “You asked him for his autograph, and he stopped to ask you about you. You auditioned for Second City, and John watched you smiling, laughing. And though you didn’t get the job, you did get to walk away thinking, ‘What do they know? John Candy thinks I’m funny.’ You walked behind John to communion. You carried his bags up to his hotel room, and he said, ‘Hey, that’s too heavy. Let me get that for you.’ And then he tipped you. Or was that a day’s pay?…you caught a John Candy scene on TV one night, right when you needed to laugh more than anything in the world.”
Meeting John Candy
O’Hara also shares her own story of meeting Candy in 1974, when he was director of the Second City touring company.
“When I joined him in the main cast, he drove us all the way to Chicago to play their Second City stage,” O’Hara recalls. “And I had a crush on him, of course, but he was deeply in love with [his wife, Rosemary]. So I got to be his friend, and I closed the Chicago bars with him, just to be with him. We did SCTV together. When we all tried to come up with opening credits that would somehow tell the audience exactly what we were trying with the show to say about TV, it was John who said, ‘Why don’t we just throw a bunch of TVs off a building?’”
The whole eulogy is filled with lovely details, as O’Hara reflects on Candy’s graciousness, his collaborative spirit, and the overall sparkle of his comedy.
“His movies are a safe haven for those of us who get overwhelmed by the sadness and troubles of this world,” she says. “As if he knew he’d be leaving us soon, John left us a library of fun to remember him by.”
And she ends with a moving note to illustrate their closeness: “God bless, dear John, our patron saint of laughter. God bless and keep his soul. I will miss him. But I hope and pray to leave this world too some day and to have a place near God—as near as any other soul, with the exception of John Candy.”
The Candy legacy
After the eulogy video resurfaced on Reddit, dozens of fans shared their emotions.
“I was eight years old when he passed, and to this day no celebrity death has ever hit me harder,” one user wrote. “How could such a bright light be gone so early? She’s right, his films are a safe haven for the soft-hearted. RIP.” Another added, “John Candy died over 30 years ago, but it still stings like it was yesterday. He left such an incredible and rare cultural mark.”
Candy was also the subject of the 2025 Amazon Prime documentary John Candy: I Like Me, directed by Colin Hanks and produced by Ryan Reynolds, in which O’Hara herself appears alongside other friends and collaborators. Conan O’Brien has talked frequently about how much he loved the SCTV star; he once talked to Howard Stern about his impactful meeting with Candy back in 1984, when O’Brien was a 21-year-old student at Harvard University (and president of the Harvard Lampoon).
“We ended up hanging out,” O’Brien recalled, “and what I remember most clearly is that he was everything I wanted him to be. He was John Candy.”
This article originally appeared last year. It has been updated.
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Menstrual pads and tampons can contain toxic substances – here’s what to know about this emerging health issue
What shows up in testing, why it matters, and why it’s hard to study.
About half of the global population menstruates at some point in their lives. Disposable products, such as tampons and pads, are some of the most popular products used around the globe to manage menstrual flow.
Unfortunately, studies have shown that many personal care products, including shampoo, lotion, nail polish and menstrual products, contain hazardous chemicals. Items used in or near the vagina are of particular concern because they are in contact with vaginal mucous membranes – the moist tissue lining the inside of the vagina that secretes mucus. These tissues can absorb some chemicals very efficiently.
People use menstrual products 24 hours a day for multiple days monthly, over the course of many years. Tampons, which are used internally, are surrounded by the permeable vaginal mucous membrane for up to eight hours at a time.
I am an environmental epidemiologist, and I study chemical exposure, its sources and its health effects. As a person who menstruates, I also must make my own decisions around menstrual products and manage the challenge of finding accurate information about women’s health risks, which receive less research attention and funding than men’s health.
In 2024, I co-authored the first paper that detected metals in tampons, including toxic metals like lead and arsenic. My colleagues and I also wrote a review paper that surveyed the scientific literature and found about two dozen studies measuring chemicals in menstrual products.
The various chemicals that these studies detected were typically at concentrations low enough to make their health impact unclear. However, they included chemicals known to disrupt the endocrine system, which makes and controls hormones that are essential for bodies to function.
How contaminants get into menstrual products
The first modern tampon in the U.S. was patented in 1931. Nearly a century later, tampons still are made primarily from cotton, rayon or a blend of the two.
Chemicals may get into tampons and other menstrual products in a number of ways. Some chemicals, like heavy metals, are present in soil, either naturally or due to pollution, and may be absorbed by cotton plants.
Other chemicals, such as zinc, may be intentionally added to menstrual products to prevent the growth of harmful bacteria. Still others, such as phthalates – synthetic chemicals used to manufacture plastics – may leach into menstrual products from plastic packaging or be added as part of a fragrance.
Research suggests that these chemicals are present in a large proportion of menstrual products – we found lead present in all 30 tampons we tested. What we don’t yet know is if these chemicals can get into people’s bodies in a high enough concentration to cause health effects in either the reproductive system or elsewhere in the body.
Limited federal regulations
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulates tampons, menstrual cups and scented menstrual pads as Class II medical devices, which carry moderate to medium risk. Unscented menstrual pads are Class I medical devices, which are considered low-risk. These categories are based on the risk the device may present to a consumer who uses it in the intended way.
FDA guidance for Class II devices offers only a few general guidelines with respect to chemicals. For menstrual tampons and pads, it recommends – but does not require – that products should not contain two specific dioxin products or “any pesticide and herbicide residues.” Dioxins are a chemical by-product of the bleaching process to whiten cotton, and they are associated with cancer and endocrine disruption. Using non-chlorine bleaching methods can reduce dioxin formation.
The most stringent regulation of tampons in the U.S. occurred after an illness called toxic shock syndrome became a public concern in the 1970s and 1980s. Menstrual toxic shock syndrome occurs when the bacteria Staphlococcus aureus grows in the vagina on inserted menstrual products and releases a toxin called TSST-1. This substance can be absorbed through the vaginal mucosa and cause a variety of symptoms, including fever, high blood pressure, shock and even death.
During this epidemic, in which at least 52 cases were recorded and seven people died over a period of eight months, tampons were associated with the syndrome – especially a highly absorbent tampon called Rely, which was pulled from the market.
In response, the FDA created a task force that recommended standardizing the tampon absorbencies and advised consumers to use the lowest absorbency for their flow. This is why tampons in the U.S. now come in a range of absorbencies, from light through regular to super and ultra, so that users can choose the level they need while minimizing risk of toxic shock.
Living in a ‘soup of chemicals’
Just because a chemical is present in a menstrual product doesn’t mean it can get into the body. However, chemicals like lead and arsenic are known threats to human health. So it’s important to study whether harmful chemicals present in menstrual products could contribute to health problems.
Humans in the modern world live in what expert toxicologist Linda Birnbaum, former director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, calls a “soup of chemicals.” Simply being present on Earth means being exposed to many chemicals, at different concentrations, all at once. This makes it difficult to unravel the relationship between a single chemical exposure and health.
Nonetheless, science has shown that chemical exposure from at least one menstrual product – vaginal douches – does affect health. Vaginal douching is the process of washing or cleaning the inside of the vagina with water or other fluids.
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommends avoiding this process, which can harm healthy bacteria in the vagina, increasing the risk of vaginal infections and other diseases.
In addition, a 2015 study found that women who use vaginal douches have higher concentrations of a chemical called monoethyl phthalate in their urine. Exposure to this substance is associated with reproductive health problems, such as reduced fertility and increased pregnancy risk.
Can these chemicals be absorbed?
Scientists are working now to determine what concentrations of metals and other chemicals can leach out of tampons and other menstrual products. One 2025 study estimated that volatile organic compounds, a group of chemicals that vaporize quickly, can be absorbed through the vaginal mucosa. Volatile organic compounds may be added to menstrual products as part of fragrances, adhesives or other product components.
My team and I are now shifting our focus to the relationship between menstrual product use, various chemicals, and menstrual pain and bleeding severity. We want to see whether some chemicals will be elevated in menstrual blood, whether these chemical levels are higher in people who use tampons, and whether the chemicals are associated with greater menstrual pain and bleeding.
States are starting to act on this issue. For example, in 2024, Vermont became the first U.S. state to ban multiple chemicals from disposable menstrual products. California bans PFAS, a widely used group of highly persistent chemicals, from menstrual products. New York adopted a law in December 2025 barring multiple toxic chemicals from menstrual products.
California also enacted a law in October 2025 that requires manufacturers of disposable tampons and pads to measure concentrations of arsenic, cadmium, lead and zinc in their products, and to share those measurements with the state, which can publish them. More information like this will help support informed choices for millions of consumers who rely on menstrual products every month.
This article originally appeared on The Conversation. You can read it here.
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Goodbye, knee pain. In a medical first, scientists have found a way to regrow damaged cartilage.
Catherine O’Hara’s tear-jerking eulogy for John Candy was a master class in memorializing a true friend
Menstrual pads and tampons can contain toxic substances – here’s what to know about this emerging health issue
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