Bird Brains in Action
Birds are smart. In Japan, Carrion crows and humans line up patiently at the signal light. When the lights change, the birds hop in front of the cars and place walnuts, which they picked from the adjoining trees, on the road. After the lights turn green again, the birds fly away and vehicles drive over the nuts, cracking them open. Finally, when it’s time to cross again, the crows join the ped... posted on Jun 18, 1322 reads

FBI Agent A Reluctant Hero
He's an FBI special agent, a father, a crisis hotline volunteer, and -- on Thursday -- he'll donate a kidney to someone he just met. But Tom Simon doesn't want to be called a hero. Simon, 37, says he wanted to make a difference in someone's life and show others that donating an organ isn't difficult to do. He looked on a donor Web site, www.matchingdonors.com, and found Brenda Lagrimas' profile. S... posted on Jun 11, 1524 reads

A Neighbor's Sacrifice
"My Dad's company provided rental accommodations for its employees, usually in multi-level buildings. We were on level 4. For two years, my Dad had been pursuing his application for a ground level house to make the climb easier for my mom who had suffered complications after her second delivery. She was advised bed rest and climbing the stairs everyday was difficult for her. As luck had it, just ... posted on Sep 5, 4193 reads

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Priya Karve pondered the five million tons of leaves that were annually produced and discarded in her local Maharashtra, India. Was there any way this waste could be useful? After much thought, work, and experimentation, the answer turned out yes! Priya managed to produce a cheap and natural fuel, saving farmers tons, and benefiting the environment as well, winning her the prestigious Ashden Aw... posted on Oct 5, 819 reads

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Deeply moved by two books: 'Ishmael' by Daniel Quinn and 'The Ecology of Commerce' by Paul Hawken, Ray C. Anderson set out to turn his multi-billion dollar corporation into a sustainable and environmentally-friendly company, focused on recycling and diminished waste... and succeeded.... posted on Sep 26, 1223 reads

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When nine-month-old Jonathan Barzach died from spinal muscular atrophy, his parents -- Amy and Peter -- grieved heavily. As they searched for ways to heal and for ways to celebrate their son's life, they remembered seeing a little girl in a wheelchair at a local playground sadly watching the other children play. Deeply inspired, the Barzach family led a community-wide effort to develop Jonathanâ... posted on Feb 5, 1038 reads

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The bathroom medicine cabinet is one of the worst places to keep medicines. The heat and moisture of the bathroom are just the conditions required to alter medication chemistry, making them weaker and possibly ineffective, and in some cases, toxic. A cool dry area away from sunlight and children is optimal. (Source: The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center)... posted on Dec 19, 870 reads

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Malcolm Gladwell, in 'The Tipping Point', notes that ideas and behavior and messages and products sometimes behave just like outbreaks of infectious disease. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic, so too can a few fare-beaters and graffiti artists fuel a subway crime wave. They are social epidemics. The moment they take off, when they reach their critical mass, is the tipping point,... posted on Dec 17, 870 reads

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In 1992, a crazed, nude woman ran up and down a street under the mid day sun. As people either gawked or walked on, two young women hugged her and took her to their college nearby. They cleaned her, clothed her and calmed her down. Vaishnavi and Vandana were barely out of their teens when they set out on a life of service.... posted on Apr 2, 1358 reads

Removing Smallpox from the World
A young man in his twenties, who wants to serve the world, gets an mandate from his teacher -- "go remove smallpox in the world." Dr. Larry Brilliant takes a 17-hour bus ride from a remote area in the Himalayas and heads to the United Nations. Rejected. His teacher tells him to go again. Rejected again. He went back and forth two dozen times, his outfit gradually changing from monastary cloth... posted on Jul 16, 973 reads

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"Read me," said the sticker on 'The Catcher in the Rye'. The paperback had been left on a Santa Monica bus, where a rider noticed it and took it home. When he'd finished, he left in a hotel lobby, hoping another stranger would find it, read it, and pass it on. Ron Hornbaker, 37, wanted to make the whole world a library and started bookcrossing.com which encourages people to abandon books so oth... posted on Aug 7, 2290 reads

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A tidy father. A messy bedroom. And a determined teenage daughter. These ingredients spawned a grass-roots charity run by a 17-year-old girl who is donating 400 backpacks stuffed with notebooks, Pokémon folders and pencil boxes to needy kids. Winnie Kao's 'Packs of Love' began in spring 2002 when her father lectured her about the mounds of school supplies cluttering her room and about how privil... posted on Sep 9, 992 reads

A Mechanic's Ministry
Slumped over the wheel of a stubborn car that just won't start, many a desperate person has pleaded with God for help. For mechanics Craig Brandenburg and Teang Ie, praying for automotive miracles is just part of the routine. Every weekday the two service a steady stream of cars in their mechanics ministry! They charge on a sliding scale, depending on the income and circumstances of the customer... posted on May 29, 1048 reads

Searching For Angela Shelton
Three years ago Angela Shelton decided to call up all of the other Angela Sheltons in America. She did a search on the Internet, spoke with 32 Angelas and drove 14,000 miles in 57 days to meet 17 of them. She told them that she was a filmmaker in Hollywood, who came from an abusive background, who had almost been raped twice, and who was a single divorced woman living with her dog and trying to ... posted on Mar 17, 1453 reads

Seek the Truth
Katharine Gun, a 29 year old woman was working as a translator for British intelligence when she found out that the United States and England were spying on diplomats. At the United Nations in New York, the two countries were wiretapping homes and office telephones along with reading e-mails. The targets were delegations from six countries considered to be pivotal - Mexico, Chile, Angola, Cameroon... posted on Jan 9, 1279 reads

Nobel Prize for Love
Every year, to much less fanfare, the "real" Nobel Prizes are preceded by the Alternative Nobel Prizes, formally known as the Right Livelihood Awards. Think of it as the Nobel Prize for Love. This year's winners are relatively unsung heros of planetary transformation, champions of sustainability, democracy, and justice. There's Walden Bello and Nicanor Perlas, two Philippine intellectual activ... posted on Jan 1, 997 reads

Timeless
More than half of Americans believe in 'anomalous phenomena' like clairvoyance, unexplained coincidence, prayer healing and psychokinesis. Yet mainstream science remains unconvinced. After all, these anomalies appear to fly in the face of everything we know about how mind and matter interact. But that may be about to change. This year, Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, a professor of psychology at the Univer... posted on Jan 3, 1126 reads

A Bird's Song
This Christmas, while most of us are fiddling with new toys and trying on new sweaters, over 50,000 people around the Western Hemisphere will be grabbing coats and binoculars and trudging out to look for birds. Migratory birds around the world are in deep trouble, with plummeting populations and, scientists say, insufficient existing research to know exactly how best to help them. The Christmas B... posted on Dec 26, 1035 reads

Risk something for love
It was never going to be easy for the American sergeant and the Iraqi doctor who fell in love in Baghdad - he was kicked out of the army and the country and she was threatened in the street. But now the couple, who married last August and haven't seen each other since, are to be reunited.... posted on Feb 17, 1850 reads

Double Bottom Line
Chocolate cakes. Mousse Cakes. Lemon Cakes. They also bake wedding cakes, and cakes that have been served at the White House. A bakery in Yonkers, N.Y. is not only making cakes for the rich and famous, but also supporting the poor and disenfranchised! Greyston Bakery is a social experiment that started more than 20 years ago with the goal of employing the chronically unemployed -- getting them o... posted on Jan 13, 1187 reads

Monks and Scientists
He’s the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize winner, author of many best-sellers, a revered spiritual figure and Tibet's leader-in-exile. But a wannabe engineer? Indeed, the Dalai Lama has often quipped that engineering would have been his preferred path had he not become a monk. But it was brain science, not engineering, that brought the Dalai Lama to MIT last September; at that Investigating the Mind co... posted on Feb 10, 2519 reads

Ten Thousand Dollar Bills
Wherever he goes, something unexpected happens. And almost everyone is smiling. That's because Kevin Shelton goes out to public places -- shopping malls, movie theatres, restaurants and beaches -- with 10,000 dollar bills strapped to his chest and gives them away, one dollar at a time ... to whoever wants it, no questions asked. People line up to get the dollar and almost everyone asks him, "Wh... posted on Apr 17, 1091 reads

Kindness of the Back Roads
If they had grown up in Vietnam, Chi and Truc Nguyen might have learned to play the 16-string zither, a traditional Vietnamese instrument. Zither instructors, however, are hard to come by in California, so their mother signed them up for piano lessons instead. But Kim and Danh Nguyen wanted to make sure not all of their culture's values and traditions were lost on their daughters, so they took t... posted on Feb 28, 1010 reads

No Straight Lines
In 1927, at the age of 32, he stood on the shores of Lake Michigan, prepared to throw himself into the freezing waters. His first child had died. He was bankrupt, discredited and jobless, and he had a wife and new-born daughter. On the verge of suicide, it suddenly struck him that his life belonged, not to himself, but to the universe. He chose at that moment to embark on what he called "an experi... posted on Apr 8, 1408 reads

Never Planned My Life
"Wouldn't you come back and help us?" The gentle question from a Afghani resident, almost an afterthought, struck her like the bolt from a crossbow. After covering the U.S. war in Afghanistan, NPR reporter Sarah Chayes decided to give up her job as a journalist and remain in Afghanistan to help rebuild the country. Sarah, with two degrees from Harvard, a Radcliffe College Prize and an inspiring... posted on Apr 22, 1113 reads

Staple-less Stapler!
If a stapler doesn’t use staples, should it be called a stapless? Or maybe an unstaple? Nonetheless, stapleless staplers are quickly becoming the inexpensive, environmentally friendly, and innovative alternatives to paper clips and staplers. Instead of using bent pieces of metal to secure paper, a stapleless stapler cuts tiny flaps, bends them, and weaves them back through a notch to bind pages... posted on Jan 4, 1894 reads

28 Year Old MIT Grad
He's not your typical 28 year old. Vikram Kumar shares a two-bedroom apartment with a sister and a nephew and gets around town by bicycle or in a 20-year-old Mercedes Benz. By day, this MIT grad works as a pathology resident in a Boston hospital and by night, he's the tech executive for a company hoping to improve rural health care in developing countries with handheld computer technology. Desp... posted on Oct 30, 1077 reads

Musical Afterlife of Songbird
Eva believed in an afterlife, and she’s getting it—- at least musically. Before her tragic death, at the age of 33, Eva Cassidy had recorded two albums and sold it primarily from the trunk of her car. After she died in 1996, her friends published her work and almost overnight, a painfully shy, simple woman gifted with an angelic voice became a full-fledged legend. Her albums have now sold o... posted on May 6, 902 reads

What the #$*! Do We Know?!
What the #$*! Do We Know?! That's the adept title of a new movie that explores quantum physics: a world of infinite possibilities in which the rigid laws of science and all our suppositions about the universe suddenly seem very shaky. Scientists agree that the observable world is a kind of "matrix of energy," in which our consciousness is a powerful force, and what we see internally is as "real"... posted on Jun 4, 1544 reads

Bus 174
Sometime on the afternoon of June 12, 2000, Rio de Janeiro Bus 174 and its passengers were taken hostage by an unknown young man. Brandishing a gun, the man, dubbed "Sergio" by the police, held on to the bus for four and half traumatic hours. The police, in a series of epic mishandlings, allowed the media to get up close to the bus. Soon after he noticed the camera crews, "Sergio" uncovered his fa... posted on Nov 18, 1301 reads

Venus Transit
No living person has ever seen this happen. Today, Venus will cross the Sun for the first time since 1882, and only for fifth time in recorded history. Astrologers point out that Venus transits, which come in 8-year pairs, pre-empt a signficant transition in human consciousness. Previously, in 1581/26, Magellan del Cano went around the world, Reformation began and female rulers came to Europe... posted on Jun 9, 1196 reads

What Humans Can't See
A Canadian man, driving a car packed with weapons and 6000 rounds of ammunition, was intent on killing as many people as possible in a Toronto neighborhood but gave up the plan at the last minute when he encountered a friendly dog, police said. The mentally disturbed man had set himself up in an east-end park to load his weapons and then planned to drive around shooting. He later told police tha... posted on Jun 29, 1185 reads

Cellphones For Prayer
You've heard of cellphones. But this cell phone, from Dubai, helps you pray. Ilkone i800 is a handset designed for the Islamic community. It converts dates between Hijri and Gregorian calendars, points to qibla direction for prayer, has the complete Quran in Arabic and English fonts, and has a prayer timer with 5,000 cities pre-set and even an "azan" voice calling for prayer.... posted on Jul 21, 1416 reads

Rags to Riches to Kindness
He's been a burglar, a crack smoker, a state prisoner, an alcoholic and, for the past three years, a panhandler in San Francisco. But now he's also an art benefactor. Don's long-estranged mother recently died, unexpectedly leaving him $187,000! The first thing Don did when he got the money was cut a $10,000 check to the art gallery he has sat in front of for two years, panhandling and begging f... posted on Jul 23, 1981 reads

Growing small, I disappear
He spent years in exile, stared some of the worst torture of the 20th century in the face and won the nobel prize in literature. His work grappled ceaselessly with the religious and metaphysical paradox of how to live, and maintain one's faith, in a world of mass-scale suffering. Robert Hass, a fellow laureate said of his friend: "He had the idea that he could somehow redeem all the suffering if ... posted on Aug 18, 1366 reads

Power of Now
For two years, a small man sits quietly on a park bench. People walk by, lost in their thoughts. One day someone asks him a question. In the weeks that follow there are more people and more questions. Word spreads that the man is a "mystic," and has discovered something that brings peace and meaning into our lives. Today, more than 20 years after his first question on the park bench, Eckhart Tolle... posted on Sep 8, 1205 reads

Neighborhood Day
National Neighborhood Day is the second Sunday of every September, this year on Sep 12th. It was established as an annual day to recognize and reinforce the relationships that are the fabric of all communities -- our neighbors! It is a day of simple gatherings of neighbors to re-kindle friendships; welcome new neighbors; catch up on each others' families, interests and needs; and share food, fel... posted on Sep 9, 1480 reads

110 Years of Sustainable Agriculture
A plot of land on the campus of Auburn University shows that 110 years of sustainable farming practices can produce similar cotton crops to those using other methods. In 1896, Professor J.F. Duggar at the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Alabama (now Auburn University) started an experiment to test his theories that sustainable cotton production was possible on Alabama soils if growers would... posted on Sep 22, 2074 reads

Grains of Rice
Donate a handful of rice a day! That's how Community Radio Madanpokhara (CRM) of Nepal, a community-owned radio station, is raising money. Instead of millionaires, the villagers are giving and it's adding up quickly. It's now a big part of CRM's budget -- they expect to raise USD 4000 this first year -- and is critical for the radio station's sustenance; and the idea has dramatically enhanced co... posted on Nov 11, 1855 reads

That Which Satisfies
Pause a moment and think: What's the most satisfying event that you have experienced in the last month? Psychologist Kennon Sheldon and his colleagues put that question to samples of university students. Then they asked the students to rate the extent to which 10 different needs were met by the satisfying event. The three emotional needs that most strongly accompanied that satisfaction -- self-es... posted on Nov 6, 1574 reads

In a New York Minute
All it takes is a New York minute. A business exec taking time out to give bi-lingual train directions to a woman in need; a bureaucrat and tattoo parlor owner sharing a light moment in the elevator; a man discovering his stolen bike and then loaning it to the rider for the day; an ex-pat New Yorker living in Hawaii discovering a most unlikely connection between homes old and new. In the fast pace... posted on Nov 19, 1461 reads

What Makes A Hero?
Patrick Burke had never wanted to follow in the footsteps of his firefighter dad and brother, but he jumped into an icy lake to rescue a 9-year-old and her father, whose all-terrain vehicle crashed through ice. "I'm not that type of heroic person," said Burke. "If you had heard that girl's voice . . . it was my daughter's voice." Experts say it makes sense that everyday heroes don't stop and think... posted on Sep 25, 3230 reads

237 Kids
The walls and tabletops in Roger and Imogene Gorsuch's home are lined with photos of their children — all 237 of them. After 45 years as foster parents, taking in mostly infants and toddlers of many nationalities and skin colors, the 86-year-old couple has decided to call it quits. "It was nothing spectacular. All we did was just keep children," said Mrs. Gorsuch.... posted on Dec 15, 1113 reads

Cell Phones For Soldiers
For all the billions of dollars being spent on the war in Iraq, 14-year-old Brittany Bergquist is surprised that the U.S. military doesn't do what she and her little brother are doing: helping soldiers phone home free. With $14 from their piggy banks, she and 12-year-old brother Robbie started Cell Phones for Soldiers. In less than nine months, the organization has provided $250,000 worth of pre... posted on Dec 30, 1120 reads

Fruits of Love
With the hullabaloo of the December holidays over, food donations at the Second Harvest Food Bank have dwindled. But one child has stepped forward to provide the fruits of California's winter. Jacob Olian, 8, dreamed up the plan to collect the oranges, grapefruits, tangerines and lemons from people's backyards and give them to the food bank. Jacob typed up a flyer that read “Got Fruit?� and a... posted on Feb 11, 947 reads

A Path with Art
In 1963, Bill Strickland was a 16-year old kid struggling to survive in a decaying Pittsburgh neighborhood until one afternoon he peered into an open classroom door and saw something he'd never saw before, a mound of clay being worked into a vessel by a man absorbed in his work. That teacher mentored Strickland, and put him on a path that lead him not only to college and out of poverty, but also t... posted on Feb 26, 1345 reads

Chernobyl
The explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear power station in 1986 that spewed 190 tons of highly radioactive uranium into the atmosphere over the Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus, has left a legacy of cancer and hardship for 3-4 million children. For the past 15 years, Adi Roche of the Chernobyl Children’s Project International has worked tirelessly in creating the medical programs to help children like... posted on Mar 11, 1158 reads

Magic Pill
In the bottle before you is a pill, a marvel of modern medicine that will regulate gene transcription throughout your body, helping prevent heart disease, stroke, diabetes, obesity, and 12 kinds of cancer. Your bones will become stronger. You'll grow new capillaries in your heart, your skeletal muscles, and your brain, improving blood flow and the delivery of oxygen and nutrients. Your attention s... posted on Mar 23, 1456 reads

Nursing Home
Dr. Bill Thomas is a dynamic gerontologist with the unwavering belief that the nursing-home industry should be about creating spaces and services for living, not dying. His nonprofit company, Eden Alternative, "deinstitutionalizes" dreary facilities by introducing pets, plants, children, and dramatic cultural change to create enlivening environments and eliminate the plagues of loneliness, helples... posted on Mar 30, 1161 reads

Surf Aid
Four years ago, physician and surfer Dr. Dave Jenkins chartered a luxury yacht in the Mentawai Islands with one goal in mind: to find perfect waves. What he also found, though, were the Mentawai islanders---mostly women and children-–-suffering and dying from the ravages of malaria and other preventable diseases. In response, Dr. Jenkins establish SurfAid International, a non-profit organization... posted on Apr 19, 859 reads