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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

The Few Who Stayed
Much of what the world remembers about the Rwandan genocide are grim tales of betrayal, of neighbors killing neighbors and the slaughter of innocents. But there are other stories of people who resisted the urge to kill and who risked their lives to save the lives of others. Among them was Carl Wilkens, the only American who refused to be airlifted out of Rwanda with the other Westerners and staye... posted on Dec 24, 1100 reads

Ten Thousand Photographs
Southwest Airlines is a little different than other airlines. Aside from being three times more profitable than all others in North America and aside from keeping all of its employees working when others laid off by the 1,000’s in the aftermath of 9/11, the walls of their head office have more than 10,000 (no, that is not a typo) photographs of employees (at work and at play), their families, th... posted on Mar 24, 1183 reads

Free Culture
The opposite of a copyright is perhaps Lawrence Lessig. Or a "copyleft", as he is often called. He explains that we come from a tradition of "free culture" -- not "free" as in "free beer" but "free" as in "free speech," "free markets," "free trade," "free enterprise," "free will," and "free elections." A free culture supports and protects creators and innovators. The opposite of a free culture ... posted on Apr 7, 1227 reads

Newman's Own
It started off as just an idea, and then just sort of took off! Paul Newman, as sole owner of Newman's Own, donates all his profits and royalties after taxes for educational and charitable purposes. To date, he has given over 150 million dollars to thousands of charities.... posted on Jul 10, 812 reads

In the Prison Cell
While in the Soviet concentration camp -- where 60 million were killed -- Alexander Solzhenitsyn made a vow to trace back his entire life and remember (and undo) any mistakes he had ever made! The consequence? He wrote a three volume, 1900 page book, all in his head. 'The Gulag Archipelago' was published years later, after his release from the camp, and was, in part, responsible for the fall of ... posted on Apr 13, 1081 reads

Like Water For Profit
Rudolph Amenga-Atego won the Goldman Prize for, as Hillary Lindsay puts it, "his struggle to secure safe and affordable drinking water for the people of Ghana," a West African country that subsidizes the cost of water for its poor communities. But, like most developing countries, Ghana owes plenty of money to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and was forced to raise water rates b... posted on Jun 23, 1224 reads

Modern Day Alchemist
A modern day alchemist. That's what they call John Todd, who creates "living systems" that amazingly transform vile wastes into clean water and other useful commodities! His executive assistant: nature. Here's how it works-- when raw sewage is pumped into plastic tanks, 200 plant species drink up nutrients in the sewage as countless bacteria and microbes roots break down pollutants. As the sewa... posted on Apr 29, 1252 reads

Mother of Thirteen
Susan isn’t a saint. She is far from wealthy. Her husband walked out shortly after the second child was adopted. But somehow -- with no steady income or savings, but with tremendous love, compassion, and dedication -- Susan provides a home and family for children so outwardly damaged, their biological parents can’t or won’t care for them. At 53, Susan is the mother of thirteen, including el... posted on May 11, 2303 reads

Latitudes and Attitudes
Changing laws have broken many barriers for people with disabilities when it comes to the travel industry. Collectively, they now spend over $13 billion annually and attract much attention from businesses. Yet, now comes the slower change: attitudes. Recent Harris Poll shows that 58% of Americans are "scared or uneasy" around people with disabilities and 43% actually "fear" interacting with th... posted on Jul 8, 951 reads

Granny D
She is five feet tall and 93 years young. Throughout her life, she has stood up for the changes she wanted to see in the world. And so, it is no surpirse that she recently finished a 3200 mile walk across the United States -- averaging more than 10 miles a day for 14 months -- for campaign finance reform. Throughout her journey, she would make speeches, ask social action group to unite and keep... posted on Jul 14, 910 reads

Cruise Control
Sitting in stationary traffic is, at best, a Zen experience. To the surprise of many, more roads and lanes don't help. Traffic jams are caused by not having enough space between your car and the vehicle in front of you. But now, according to new research in America and Germany, drivers can take back control over the roads with ACC, Adaptive Cruise Control. It's a modified version of traditiona... posted on Jul 15, 1241 reads

Saved by the Web
The Internet has done many things for many people. For Bev Holzrichter, it saved her life. As Bev was helping her horse give birth, the horse kicked her three times, knocking her to the floor. She was alone in the stable and her husband wasn't due for another three days. Fortunately, Bev's web cam was on and people around the world were watching -- people from California to Germany, who called... posted on Jul 20, 1176 reads

Singing Flowers
A Japanese company is coming out with an amplifier that sits in flower pots and sends vibrations up the stems of planets to make their flowers act as speakers! Called the "Flower Speaker Amplifiers", the gadget made by Let's Corp is hidden in a vase or a potted plant and sends music at just the right frequency to vibrate up the stems and then be converted into audible sound by the plant as a whol... posted on Jul 29, 796 reads

An Honest Cabbie
He makes $80 a day as a cab driver in New York. But on July 16, a passenger in Nestor Sulpico's cab left a backpack stuffed with black pearl jewelry worth $70,000! It was his chance to pay off his back rent, go to college and pay his overdue bills. Instead he decided to the "right thing" and returned the pearls to the owner. As it turns out, he regained his Filipino citizenship, the president ... posted on Aug 24, 945 reads

A Mother's Pilgrimage
He's walked 3,750 miles for the last eight years and he figures he has another 12 more years left, if he lives that long. Kailashgiri, also known as Swami, is taking an all-India pilgrimage. On his shoulders rests a wooden bar, balancing two baskets -- one with his meagre belongings and the other with his blind mother! Kailashgiri Brahmachari's mother has been blind from birth and he is now ful... posted on Aug 26, 1461 reads

A Strange Anomaly
Via dei Laghi runs 60 kms south of Rome, at the edge of the Albanian lake and an extinct volcanic crater. Shortly along this uphill road, a strange anomaly occurs. Bottles and other things roll uphill here in a weak upward gradient, without additional driving power. Even heavy cars move up with engine fully switched off. Originally scientists thought it to be some sort of an optical illusion, b... posted on Sep 4, 1301 reads

Lance Armstrong's Newest Challenge
"Myself, my bicycle and my cause." With those words, Lance Armstrong, the greatest cyclist of his generation, announced on Wednesday that he's planning a comeback to competitive bike racing. But the cancer survivor has a greater goal than winning races -- he hopes to use the Livestrong Global Cancer Initiative he's launching to help meet the needs of cancer patients around the world. The campaign,... posted on Sep 30, 1848 reads

Meditation and Arthritis
Dalia Isicoff knows pain. A lifelong sufferer of rheumatoid arthritis, she has had seven hip replacement surgeries. Since leaving the hospital in February following her latest operation, however, she hasn't taken any painkillers. Not because the pain isn't there — it is. But Isicoff, 52, said she has learned to accept the pain, the disease, and herself, thanks to meditation. Researchers at Uni... posted on Sep 16, 1218 reads

Tears and Cheers at Cochrane High
It was a sight that brought tears to the eyes of many of the hundreds that lined the street outside Cochrane High School Sept. 16. The word spread like wildfire through the school during lunchtime. Cochrane High’s 800 students had just completed a 4-km Terry Fox walk and run around the school and had already gone back inside when it became apparent the mini-marathon wasn’t done yet. Fifteen-... posted on Oct 16, 1096 reads

World on Fire
Sarah McLachlan asked what her video budget could buy, and found the answer in the Third World. Instead of spending $150,000 on a music video production for her chart topping single, 'World on Fire', Sarah and a few volunteers put it together for $15 (cost of a mini DV tape) and donated rest of the money to 11 charities in developing countries!... posted on Oct 14, 1302 reads

Just say Yes!
He dropped out of 5th grade. At 16, in the mid 80s, he took off in his car to reach out to the youth. Instead of 'just say no', he was urging youth to just say 'yes' -- yes to living with meaning, purpose, integrity and commitment. One school assembly after another, he would get people fired up about service and engaged in local community work. To date, his efforts have touched more than 625,000... posted on Oct 23, 1711 reads

The Heart
Science is coming to terms with the sages, it seems. The heart, initially just seen as a mere blood pump, is now recognized as the most critical nodal point that connects a communications network of body, mind, emotion, and spirit! As a primary generator of rhythmic patterns in the human body, not only does the human heart possess a greater connection with the brain than any other major organ, i... posted on Nov 17, 1854 reads

Culture Endures Economics
Modernization theorists from Karl Marx to Daniel Bell have argued that economic development brings pervasive cultural changes. But others, from Max Weber to Samuel Huntington, have claimed that cultural values are an enduring and autonomous influence on society. Ronald Inglehart and World Values group tested out the theories, using 75% of the world's population. Their results? Well, economic de... posted on Nov 20, 1421 reads

Kids With Cameras
After her masters in theology at Cambridge, Zana Briski made her second trip to India. This time her destination was the "red light" district of Calcutta. The most stigmatized people in Calcutta's red light district, are not the prostitutes, but their children. In the face of abject poverty, abuse, and despair, these kids have little possibility of escaping their mother's fate or for creating an... posted on Nov 27, 1194 reads

Journey is the Destination
In just 22 years, Dan Eldon led many lives. Best known for his vibrant and provocative journals, he was also a photojournalist, humanitarian, entrepreneur, adventurer, and student of the world. After high school, Dan hitchhiked through South Africa to photograph anti-apartheid rallies. During one of his trips to Malawi, he donated his car to "save the children". Radiating from Dan are the spok... posted on Dec 3, 1813 reads

Running Back To Ayurveda
At age 27, one of NFL's premier running backs, shocked the sports world by announcing his retirement. In place of his annual $5 million paychecks, Ricky Williams went tenting around the world for $7/day. And instead of returning to football, the 1998 Heisman trophy winner is back in school to learn about a 6000 year old science of healing -- Ayurveda! "I realized a while back that I have an inn... posted on Nov 30, 1228 reads

Rough Guide For a Better World
Although global population has risen by two billion in just thirty years and many hundreds of millions remain poor, their numbers are falling. The number of children who die before their fifth birthday, for example, halved between 1960 and 2001. The number of adults who cannot read or write fell from 53% in 1970 to 27 percent in 2001, while today twice as many people now have access to basic san... posted on Dec 2, 1253 reads

Serving Soul Food
Service his style leaves little space for anything else. He doesn't read the newspapers or watch television. He doesn't go out with friends or take vacations. But he can cut a pound of onions in four minutes flat and make 100 different varieties of pickle. Three years ago, at the age of 20, Krishnan noticed a poor man eating his own waste. That sight shook him so deeply that the next week, he qu... posted on Dec 4, 1473 reads

Helping Others Come Alive
Each week, Matt Sanford leads disabled students -- many of whom can't walk and don't have any sensations below their midtorso -- through a series of seated yoga poses, teaching them how to bring awareness into parts of their bodies they had thought were lost to them. He is especially qualified to teach these students, as he himself is a paraplegic. Taking the funds from his lawsuit settlement and ... posted on Dec 17, 1434 reads

Stress and Aging
Scientists have identified the first direct link between stress and aging, a finding that could explain why intense, long-term emotional strain can make people get sick and grow old before their time.... posted on Dec 21, 1543 reads