📰 Print-Your-Own Mini-Zine
Here's the whole front page of the good-news web, shrunk down to fit in your pocket. Hit PRINT ME!, feed your printer one sheet (Letter or A4, doesn't matter), make one little snip, and fold it into a tiny 8-page booklet of the six most recent OSSmile posts. 📎
Twenty-three students at a Dutch university spent a year building a vehicle. Then they put it on a plane, took it to Kenya, and drove it more than eight hundred kilometres on roads that would shake the fillings out of a normal van — to find out whether it could deliver healthcare to people who currently have to travel a very long way to get any. ☀️ It could. It also generated more electricity than it used while doing it.…
★ Stella Juva was built in one year by 23 students of Solar Team Eindhoven, at TU Eindhoven in the Netherlands. 🇳🇱
📷 AMREF Flying Doctors · CC BY-SA 3.0 · via Wikimedia Commons
On 3 September 2026 , about 200 million kilometres from the room where everyone was standing, a spacecraft threw away its own engine on purpose. This was the plan. It was always the plan. It was still terrifying. 🛰️ What was actually up there BepiColombo is a joint ESA and JAXA mission, and for eight years it has flown as a stack — a tower of three separate machines travelling as one: MTM the Mercury Transfer Module — the engine…
★ BepiColombo is a joint ESA and JAXA mission carrying two orbiters to Mercury — ESA's MPO and JAXA's Mio. 🛰️
📷 European Space Agency · CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
Somewhere in Alaska right now, a federal land management agency is running a bracket-style, head-to-head tournament in which the competitors are brown bears , the judging criterion is how fat they have got , and the electorate is the entire internet . 🐻 This is real. It is called Fat Bear Week , it is run by the National Park Service , and voting runs from 22 to 29 September 2026 . The rules, such as they are Sept 18…
★ Fat Bear Week runs 22–29 September 2026 at Katmai National Park & Preserve in Alaska. Vote at fatbearweek.org. 🗳️
📷 Peter Pearsall / USFWS · public domain
Here is a fact about the world that we would like you to sit with for a second. Plants glow. Not metaphorically. While a leaf is photosynthesising — absorbing sunlight, turning it and carbon dioxide into energy — it also throws a tiny amount of that light back out as fluorescence . Every blade of grass you have ever walked past. Every houseplant you have ever under-watered. All of them, faintly luminous, the entire time, and invisible to the human…
★ Plants emit a faint fluorescence while they photosynthesise. It is invisible to the human eye. 🌿
📷 European Space Agency · CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
Here is a fact that is genuinely hard to hold in your head. There is a place on this planet where six million antelope move across the ground season after season, in one connected body, through grassland and floodplain and swamp, and for most of the last few decades almost nobody could go and look at it. 🦌 That place is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is the first one South Sudan has ever had. What got listed,…
★ The Boma–Badingilo Migratory Landscape was inscribed by the World Heritage Committee at its 48th session, in Busan, Republic of Korea. 🇰🇷
📷 Kristof Zyskowski · CC BY 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons
Picture a stadium crowd. Now picture every person in it holding up a light. Now lift the whole crowd a few hundred metres into the night and have them fly in formation until they turn into a panda. 🐼 That is roughly what happened over Dujiangyan, Sichuan on the night of 20 May 2026 , when a local firm called Yufengzhe Technology put 33,615 drones into the air at once. Not a rendering, not a projection: thirty-three thousand small aircraft,…
★ 33,615 drones is more aircraft than most countries' entire air forces. They all took off from one riverside city in Sichuan. 🛸
📷 ShanghaiEye · frame from the video above
Printed from ossmile.blackmesalabs.org — a deliberately tiny website about good news and happy nonsense. No algorithm. No infinite scroll. Just the world being quietly wonderful.
Photos used under Creative Commons; attribution stays on each page. Read the full stories online, and mind the construction signs. 🚧
✂️ How To Fold Your Zine
- Print the sheet above — landscape, one side, any paper size.
- Fold in half the long way (top edge down to bottom edge), then unfold.
- Fold in half the short way three times to crease all 8 panels, then unfold flat.
- Cut the slit: fold the long way again and snip along the centre crease through the middle two panels only (the dashed red line below).
- Push the ends together so the cut pops open into a +, then fold it all flat into a booklet. Pages read 1 → 8 in order. 🎉
Tip: the top row prints upside-down on purpose — that's what makes the fold work. Trust the process. 🙃
