The Science of Boredom
Virtually everyone gets bored once in a while. Most of us chalk it up to a dull environment. "The most common way to define boredom in Western culture is 'having nothing to do'" says psychologist Stephen Vodanovich of the University of West Florida. And indeed, early research into the effects of boredom focused on people forced to perform monotonous tasks, such as working a factory assembly line. ... posted on Aug 30, 3582 reads

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While on a teaching and trekking expedition, Dr. Irvine-Halliday had an idea -- to light up rural homes without electricity. He invented White Light Emitting Diodes (WLED) which are powered by energy-renewable water mills, solar panels, wind and water turbines and pedal generators.... posted on Dec 12, 1260 reads

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One of Geneen Roth’s perhaps most well-known and controversial exercises helps people to experience what they have as "enough": in conjunction with her advice to "carry a chunk of chocolate everywhere," Roth teaches how to eat that chocolate slowly and with complete awareness. The exercise, she writes, "reminds us to wake up, pay attention, stop reaching for what we don’t have, and focus on wh... posted on Oct 15, 1138 reads

How To Get Unstuck
"Do you feel overwhelmed? Exhausted? Directionless? Hopeless? Battle-torn? Worthless? Alone? These symptoms are what I call The Serious Seven -- the seven most common indicators that you're stuck. If you're feeling one of these emotions, it's likely you -- or your organization -- is stuck. I think one of the most interesting observations we gleaned from studying stuck teams is that successful team... posted on Sep 4, 6211 reads

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After any disaster, people and resources organize without planning into coordinated, purposeful activity. Everything happens quickly and a little miraculously. These self-organized efforts create effective responses long before official relief agencies can even make it to the scene. But organizational theorists have had a hard time explaining or replicating this concept. Now, Margaret Wheatley ... posted on Jan 3, 1001 reads

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The 50 Cistercian Sisters of Mount Saint Mary Abbey rise each morning at 3, pray until nearly 8 and then begin their work day making chocolate, the labor they have chosen to support themselves and their life of what they call "beautiful simplicity." Except that now 20% (and increasing) of their orders are coming in online.... posted on Apr 17, 1022 reads

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Dawn and Ed started their family by adopting two children. A year later, they adopted a child from an Native Adoption Program and three from Vietnam. Then, two more from DHS and one from India! With a 500 dollar grant from a local club, Dawn started an adoption agency in 1977 to share her knowledge. Today, MAPS helps children worldwide ... from starting an orphanage to building a one-room sch... posted on Jan 11, 804 reads

Newspaper by Children from the Slums
Children from New Delhi's slums have come together ... to start their own newspaper! 'Udayachal' has become a vehicle for highlighting the problems and concerns of the slum dwellers. Trained by the Gandhi Media Literacy program, the paper's associate editor enthusiastically noted, "Just watch us for the next six months and we will be able to do wonders. Udayachal is not just meant to be a newsp... posted on Aug 6, 1083 reads

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He's 22, leads an organization with four employees, and through his website is able to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars in a matter of days and move thousands of people to action. That's Eli Pariser of MoveOn.org ... he's redefining peace activism and highlighting the power of the web as a tool for organization.... posted on Feb 13, 1709 reads

Friends Until the End
They were neighbors, then became buddies and now they're friends till death do them apart. Walter Jednak, 85, just had a heart attack and his best friend, Howard Hunter, 73, is helping him stay alive. The inspiring story of this uncommon friendship has inspired tons of emails and letters from readers, after it was first published.... posted on Sep 24, 1301 reads

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A decade ago, big food companies dismissed animal welfare research in slaughter houses as "emotional", but now McDonalds, KFC, Wendy's and Burger King are actually funding them. McDonalds, for instance, buys 2 billion eggs every year and has pressed the industry to increase by half the amount of space it allocates to egg-laying hens in factory hen houses. They also told its egg suppliers to stop... posted on Jul 4, 1059 reads

Doctors Going the Extra Mile
Every year, about 160 Filipino born doctors in California, pack-up and head to the Philippines to provide free medical services, including medication and operations, for the indigent. This year, 160 of them made the trip and saved many lives.... posted on Jan 9, 1418 reads

Free Wheelchairs
Twenty five years ago, when mechanical engineer Don Schoendorfer saw a disabled Moroccan woman dragging herself across a dirt road with her one good arm, he asked himself a question: what would it take to build and ship simple, durable, and inexpensive wheelchairs for those in need in the developing world? A whole lot of heart and $41.17. The Free Wheelchair Mission was born. Instead of patentin... posted on Jul 31, 1382 reads

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Dolores and Linda have an idea that's coming to life -- buy a cruise ship that can hold 700 people, house a World Peace Museum honoring heroes of peace, and deliver volunteer support and humanitarian aid to needy countries. Meet the Peace Ambassadors!... posted on Mar 8, 988 reads

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A growing body of research suggests that millions are managing their stress in precisely the wrong way. They compartmentalize by stressing out all day — and then push off relaxation to isolated blocks of time like evening yoga classes and weekend getaways. But this binge-and-purge approach to stress management won't work. Wall Street Journal reports: you have to deal with stress as it happen... posted on Mar 20, 1224 reads

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Jeff Lowenfels had an idea. There are over 70 million gardeners in the U.S. alone, many of which plant vegetables and harvest more than they can consume. If every gardener plants one extra row of vegetables and donates their surplus to local food banks and soup kitchens, a significant impact can be made on reducing hunger. Jeff's idea was pretty good -- last year, 1.3 million pounds of produce ... posted on Apr 15, 593 reads

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Before the caterpillar turns into a butterfly, biologists note that there is a huge occurence of 'imaginal cells'. At first, they aren't recognized by the immune system so the caterpillar's immune system wipes them out as they pop up. It isn't until they begin to link forces and join up with each other that they get stronger and are able to resist the onslaught of the immune system, until the imm... posted on Apr 16, 1739 reads

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She has sold 143 million albums but now this mother of two children is on a quest to find the meaning of life! She's publishing a series of kiddie storybooks, working with scientists who have discovered how to neutralize radiation and plotting to make a documentary about Kabbalah, a religious philosophy based on Jewish mysticism. And she says her songs are about "letting go of illusions and thin... posted on Apr 22, 2323 reads

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He was solving math problems at 14 months, reading and correcting adults' grammar by 2 -- the same age he decided to become a vegetarian. He was explaining photosynthesis to kindergarten classmates at 5. He breezed through 10 grades of school in three years, graduated with honors from high school at 9, founded an international youth advocacy organization, met with prime ministers and presidents, a... posted on Apr 29, 1570 reads

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Searching for the comics in the local paper, a front-page article caught Craig Kielburger's attention. He read about a young boy from Pakistan who was sold into bondage as a carpet weaver, escaped and was murdered for speaking out against child labor. Craig gathered a group of friends and founded the organization 'Kids Can Free The Children'. Seven years later, he has visited 40 countries, writt... posted on May 7, 988 reads

Hug the Trees!
The mountain people had used the forests, sustainably, for their food, shelter, medicines and fodder for animals. But one fine day, the government restricted their access and sold licenses to fell trees to the highest bidder. When the first loggers, from a sporting goods manufacturer, arrived to chop the trees, Chandi Prasad Bhatt swiftly moved to action. Along with the locals, they hugged the t... posted on May 27, 1279 reads

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Allan Snyder seems to be able to turn on a person's inner "Rain Man", and then turn it off again, with the flick of a switch. All it takes is a strange set of electrodes; and a radical new theory of autism, genius and the human brain. He asked a NY Times columnist to draw a picture of a cat four times, each time with different doses of these magnetic impulses. The results were stunning. Check t... posted on Jun 28, 2939 reads

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While it is well known that the high-tech revolution has radically transformed late 20th century civilization, it is less well-known that high-tech development also harms people's health as well as the environment that sustains all life. The dark side of high technology reveals polluted drinking water, waste discharges that harm fish and wildlife, and high rates of miscarriages, birth defects, and... posted on Jul 30, 582 reads

Gorillas of Saharan Africa
Five million metric tons of bushmeat are traded each year, in the Congo Basin alone. Unfortunately, most of it is illegal and poses a major threat to African wildlife. And a scientist, David Greer, is risking his life virtually every day to run anti-poaching patrols to protect some of Africa's most significant animals, including western lowland gorillas and forest elephants. Smithsonian's Paul R... posted on Jan 14, 1237 reads

Ike Says "Vamos" to Poverty in Mexico
In 1987, three neighbors in tiny Weston, Vermont, gathered over coffee to compare notes on their recent trips to Mexico. Years later one of them, Ike Patch, would say it was the best cup of coffee they ever had. Mexico has more billionaires than any other third-world country, yet 40 percent of its people live in extreme poverty -- compared with 25 percent in India -- and are not helped by their g... posted on Oct 15, 974 reads

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Raging blizzards and a wind-chill factor of minus 100 degrees didn’t deter scientist Subhankar Banerjee from quitting his high-paying job, becoming a photographer and exploring the stark wilderness of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge! With an introduction by former President Jimmy Carter, he published his images in 'Seasons of Life and Land', which quickly became the center of a political fi... posted on Aug 28, 1041 reads

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Sprinting slightly more than a mile from Brooklyn to Manhattan does not sound like an extraordinary feat of athleticism until you close your eyes and imagine the desperate conditions under which one brave firefighter did it last Sept. 11. In those impossibly frantic moments, a married father of five -- who was technically off-duty -- abandoned his vehicle at the entrance of the Brooklyn-Battery T... posted on Sep 12, 958 reads

He Gave His Life for Others
He climbed aboard boxcars filled with people and would handout scores of protective passes, then jump from the train and demand that those with Swedish "protection" be allowed off the trains. He built safe houses to keep them away from danger. He would leverage his Swedish diplomat status to alter the course of humanity. In 1944, Raoul Wallenberg saved tens of thousands of Jews in Hungary when ... posted on Sep 5, 1028 reads

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Gary Erickson's company has grown 30% every year since 1998 but still, it's different. He and his wife refused a $100 million offer to sell their business. In 2000, Gary hired a staff ecologist, who took steps such as eliminating shrink-wrap on bulk-product boxes, which now saves 90,000 pounds of plastic annually. From inception, they launched the 2080 program at work where employees can do vo... posted on Oct 9, 885 reads

Helping Children in China
Most of the children arriving at Tim Baker's doorstep, in China were abandoned because of physical problems. When Tim and his wife moved to China 15 years ago to teach English, they also volunteered at a local orphanage. But they wanted to "do more" and so now, Tim is helping build a "children's village" that takes in unwanted babies and gives them a chance at adoption.... posted on Sep 25, 1423 reads

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Mildred Robbins Leet is an unusual philanthropist. She's not wealthy. And for 25 years, she's given away just $50 at a time. But her "micro grants" have helped transform thousands of lives around the globe. They buy fishing rods or frying pans, a farm animal, a sewing machine or a barrel of seeds, enabling "the poorest of the poor" to launch their own businesses. Leet, an 81-year-old New Yorker,... posted on Oct 18, 602 reads

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A thousand dollar loan. That's what Mimi Silbert took out to start a university of the streets, one she calls a Harvard for losers -- a concrete campus that has graduated 14,000 former pimps and prostitutes, junkies and drug dealers, armed robbers and homeless waifs. Since the 1970s, the smiling dynamo of a woman has operated Delancey Street, an alternative rehabilitation program run solely by i... posted on Oct 25, 774 reads

A Returned Wallet
Danny Graves couldn't believe what showed up in the mail. The Cincinnati Reds baseball player lost his wallet and figured he'd never see the credit cards, driver's license, pass to get into ballparks, or the $1400 in cash. But lo and behold, a man who cleaned the team's bus, not only returned the wallet and all its contents by overnight delivery, he even exchanged the cash for traveler's checks ... posted on May 21, 1161 reads

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It's just the kind of dilemma that entrepreneurs like David Green love. The West has cutting-edge, high-tech medicine, but the poor of the world, who sorely need it, can't come close to affording it. To bridge that gap, Green, a quiet idealist, is doing something revolutionary: applying market forces to Third World health care. In the process he has driven the prices of medical devices such as hea... posted on Oct 31, 2366 reads

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Open source. It's called that because the collaboration is open to all and the final product is freely shared. Open source harnesses the distributive powers of the Internet, parcels the work out to thousands, and uses their piecework to build a better whole. It works like an ant colony, where the collective intelligence of the network supersedes any single contributor. Open source is the magic b... posted on Oct 22, 1014 reads

Buildings As Parks
His Fukuoka building in Japan is a park when viewed from one side and a 15-story building when viewed from the other. Emilio Ambasz is a man who breaks architectural moulds, designing houses which are nearly invisible under mounds of earth, and high-rise buildings hidden behind screens of greenery. His architecture seamlessly brings the built and natural environments together -- evaporatively co... posted on Feb 24, 1564 reads

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What do the arrangement of rose petals, a painting by Dali, and the spiral shells of mollusks have in common? Mathematicians call it the "golden" ratio -- phi. Astrophyscist Mario Livio calls it "the world's most astonishing number." Phi is the golden ratio of antiquity (1.6180339887), a never-ending number so lauded for its harmonious qualities that in the 16th century it was dubbed the divin... posted on Nov 8, 1720 reads

Top Notch Plumber in 535BC
Imagine 535BC, you're Eupalinus, a top notch plumber in Greece. A tyrant, Polycrates, commissions you to build a massive, 4500 foot water tunnel across a steep, rocky hill that'll bring fresh spring water to town. With nothing more than mathematics and geometry, your team starts about 1,350m apart, on two opposite sides of a hill, and meets - precisely - in the middle! Being just a metre or two o... posted on Dec 23, 1072 reads

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She loved to surprise people with gifts. When Father Joe Carroll opened an envelope from her, expecting a copy of an article, he found a check for $1 million. She shelled $15 million for relief, after the Red River flooded Grand Forks. In the late 80s, she anonymously gave $7 million to build an AIDS wing at a college in the Bronx. So when the McDonald's heiress, Joan Kroc, passed away last mo... posted on Nov 11, 768 reads

Female Designed Volvo
More than a year ago, Volvo gave female employees a special project: design the car they would like to drive ... everything in a car that men want in terms of performance and styling, "plus a lot more that male car buyers have never thought to ask for," said Hans-Olov Olsson, Volvo's president. The result: a car that's designed to be nearly maintenance-free, requiring an oil change only every 31,0... posted on Mar 11, 1286 reads

Shoe Shiner's Journey
As an impoverished, illiterate shoe-shine boy on the streets of Sao Paulo, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's job was to polish battered shoes and make them appear shiny and new. After winning the presidency in 2002 by the biggest margin in Brazil's history, Lula came closer to realizing his life long mission -- a day when everyone in the world's fifth largest nation can eat three times a day. A former ... posted on Dec 6, 962 reads

Creatives at Work
The number of people doing creative work has exploded to 30% of the workforce; creative sector workers today outnumber blue collar workers and the creative sector of the economy accounts for nearly half of all wage and salary income--$1.7 trillion dollars per year. The American Dream is no longer just about money. Better pay, a nice house, and a rising standard of living will always be attractive... posted on Dec 4, 1544 reads

Vegan For Sustainability?
To survive, we all might have to turn vegan! In Stockholm this week, scientists warned that the growth in demand for meat and dairy products is unsustainable. Animals need much more water than grain to produce the same amount of food, and ending malnutrition and feeding even more mouths will take still more water. They said that the world will have to change its consumption patterns to have any... posted on Aug 20, 1615 reads

Billion Dollar Secret
He used to fly coach, buy clothes off the rack, had a plastic bag for briefcase, owned drugstore reading classes and wore a $15 plastic watch. And he secretly transferred all the shares of his company to a top-secret foundation in Bermuda that was giving to the world ... anonymously. When the cashier's check cleared, there were no black-tie galas, no self-effacing speeches. A decade later, in 1... posted on Jan 14, 1242 reads

Slow Food Movement
There's a new movement in town -- instead of fast food, it's called "slow food." Born in Italy 17 years ago, Slow Food aims to be everything fast food is not. It's slow — in the making and the eating. It's fresh — not processed. It's from neighborhood farms and stores — not from industrial growers like Tyson Foods or retail goliaths like Wal-Mart. Armed with a snail logo, Slow Food chapter... posted on Jan 16, 1429 reads

Avenues of Happiness
They throw parties. But they donate all the proceeds to development projects. Couple of young entrepreneurs, relics from Silicon Valley's dot-com era, started AHIMSA Fund to raise some money to buy musical instruments for underprivileged slum children, to setup a curriculums for them to grow further and to give them an avenue for creative expression. "Some would say, why are you wasting your ti... posted on Jan 21, 3338 reads

Measuring Emotions
Can you measure anger, love, joy? After 20 years of research, Dr. David Hawkins says yes. In his book "Power vs. Force", he presents a tool for assessing value and motive and creates a "Map of Consciousness" that illuminates the spiritual ladder we must follow as a race and as individuals. Using this method, Dr. Hawkins has made a logarithmic scale ranking of different levels of energy, from sh... posted on Jan 24, 1192 reads

Impose My Music
The verdict was in -- two and half hours of Opera music. Because Michael Carreras was cruising Miami Beach with loud rap music at 5AM, he appeared in Judge Jeffrey Swartz's court and faced a tough choice: $500 or listen to opera. Michael initially thought it was joke but later opted for opera music. :) "You impose your music on me, and I'm going to impose my music on you," the 54 year old judg... posted on Feb 12, 898 reads

The Waver
They call him "waver." Ed Carlson has walked 200,000 miles, waving to everyone he met as an expression of his love. In Utah, a judge threatened to fine him $110 or keep him in jail for 10 days. When Carlson said, "I can do what I'm doing in jail as well as free," the judge said, "I forgive you" and set him free. While he walks, he recites: "All love and understanding fills my heart" as he inhal... posted on Feb 20, 963 reads

Pace of Our Lives
To physicists, the duration of a "second" is precise and unambiguous: ~1.2 billion cycles of frequency associated with the energy levels of the isotope cesium 133. But then there's psychological time, the tempo of life. After measuring walking speed, postal speed, and clock accuracy in 31 countries, psychologist Robert Levine came up with an index for "the overall pace of life" -- Switzerland i... posted on Feb 25, 1636 reads