Nonprofit Pharmaceutical
Of the more than 100 billion dollars spent each year on health research and development, only ten percent goes into treating ninety percent of the world's health problems, found mostly in the developing world. Dr. Victoria Hale saw that part of the reason was that the pharmaceutical industry had traded its aim of developing affordable drugs to those in need, to a profit-seeking one. So, she found... posted on Dec 15, 3069 reads

Democracy
One-half of the world's population lives in countries that have multi-party electoral systems that respect basic human rights; that's the highest level in history. More than 80 countries in Central Europe, East Asia, Latin America and parts of sub-Saharan Africa have all notched gains in political and civil rights and more than 30 military dictatorships have been replaced by civilian governments.... posted on Dec 28, 1135 reads

Good News Garage
"Most needy people are poor because they don't have jobs," car mechanic Hal Colston declares. And they are often jobless, because they can't to get work. In 1996, a single mom of two children approached Hal in tears; she had just bought a car for $500, her brakes started failing on the way home, and the previous owner refused to cooperate. Not only did Hal fix that car, but he gave birth to Goo... posted on Jan 2, 1850 reads

To Be of Use
As a pioneer in the sustainable business movement -- assistant to Cesar Chavez, founder of Briarpatch Natural Food, Smith & Hawken, Organic Boquet (first organic floral company), and Organic To go -- Dave Smith is on a mission to inspire people everywhere to reconcile compassionate values with capitalism. In his book, "To Be of Use", he shares stories of how business can be a force for radical ch... posted on Jan 10, 6080 reads

Green Clean
MIT scientist Isaac Berzin envisions algae, the tiny single-celled plant, transforming the world's energy needs and cutting global warming. Bolted onto smokestacks, the rows of fat clear tube filled with a green algae soup absorb 40% of CO2 and 86% of nitrous oxide emissions. After the CO2 is soaked up like a sponge, the algae is harvested daily and turned into a biodiesel for automobiles. ... posted on Jan 22, 1450 reads

Immortality
How's this for an offer you can't refuse: how would you like to live say, 400 or 500 years, or even more and all of them in perfect health? It's both a Utopian and a nightmare scenario but there are those who say it is well within the realm of possibility. Though we live longer and healthier lives than our grandparents, 100 is more or less the outer limit because, catastrophic disease aside, we j... posted on Jan 13, 1921 reads

MLK Day
Reflect and discuss the ideas and vision of the Civil Rights Movement, and their importance in our time. ... posted on Jan 16, 1342 reads

Cooperation
Is cooperation human nature? Political science professor Robert Axelford explored this idea and found that the relationship between competitors that are placed in a recurring long-term competitive environment nearly always evolves into cooperation. In one famous example he cites from the trench warfare of World War I, troops of one side would shell the other side with mortars, but would often do ... posted on Jan 17, 1720 reads

Mirror Neurons
It's billed as the most important neural discovery of the last decade: mirror neurons. The human brain has multiple mirror neuron systems that specialize in carrying out and understanding not just the actions of others but their intentions, the social meaning of their behavior and their emotions. When a person watches someone else perform an action -- say a kick -- mirror neurons in the brain si... posted on Jan 18, 2009 reads

The Long Bet
Wanna bet that by 2050 we will receive intelligent signals from outside our solar system? How about that by the year 2020, tickets for space travel - at least to Moon, will be available over the counter? Designed to foster long-term thinking, and as a forum for focussed discussion, Long Bets is a website that you can make long-term socially significant predictions and place wagers on them. The w... posted on Jan 21, 1296 reads

Do The Right Thing
During a reconnaissance mission on March 16, 1968, Army helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson came upon U.S. ground troops killing Vietnamese civilians in the village of My Lai. Landing in the line of fire between the American troops and civilians, Thompson ordered his crew to point their guns at the U.S. soldiers to prevent more killings and so he could coax civilians out of a bunker to evacuate them. ... posted on Jan 23, 1391 reads

Trash to Fashion
Using recycled plastic, the rag pickers of an Indian slum are making highly desirable handbags for the boutiques of London and New York. What started as a small scale economic and environmental development project four years ago by an Indian couple, Shalabh and Anita Ahuja, has now turned into a $180,000 a year enterprise that provides a livelihood for over 300 people. ... posted on Jan 24, 1847 reads

Was Columbus First?
We've all read the history books -- Columbus found the New World in 1492; Dias discovered the Cape of Good Hope in 1488; and Magellan set off to circumnavigate the world in 1519. However, it may not be true! Recent evidence show that it is more likely that the world and all its continents were discovered by a Chinese admiral named Zheng He, whose fleets roamed the oceans between 1405 and 1435.... posted on Feb 3, 2145 reads

Ordinary Actions
Residents and small business owners in San Francisco and the rest of California must take their computers, cell phones, radios and fluorescent bulbs to disposal centers or could face potential fines for tossing them into the trash can.... posted on Feb 12, 1346 reads

Agricultural Revolution
Sustainable farming methods can help the poorest farmers in developing nations out of poverty. A recent study of 280 farms in 57 of the world’s poorest countries, found that techniques such as crop rotation and organic farming increased crop yields by an average of 79%, without risking future harvests. The findings challenge the dominate view that industrialized agriculture is best as many farme... posted on Feb 16, 1516 reads

Campaign for Female Education
During a trip to Zimbabwe in 1990, Ann Cotton realized that Africa would never conquer poverty and disease unless its women were educated. She found that families that could not afford to educate all their children would give priority to boys. She knew that educated women were more likely to not contract HIV/AIDS, to marry later, and to have fewer children who were healthier and more likely to go ... posted on Feb 20, 1221 reads

Retail Renunciation
About 50 Bay Area residents have made a vow to not buy anything new in 2006 -- except food, health and safety items and underwear. Calling themselves the Compact, the group meets monthly to reaffirm their commitment to the rule, which is to never buy anything new. Compacters can get as much as they want from thrift shops, Craigslist, freecycle.org, eBay and flea markets, as long as the items are s... posted on Feb 22, 1423 reads

Elder Wisdom Circle
Have you just about given up on finding the man or woman of your dreams? Have you recently been laid off? Are you 18 years old, uninterested in going to college, and paralyzed by your choices for the future? Or are you just stumped by those black spots on your tangerine trees? Answers to these, and other questions, are just an e-mail away at elderwisdomcircle.org, a pod of 55 senior citizens with ... posted on Feb 23, 1788 reads

Altruism and the Young
Oops, the scientist dropped his clothespin. Not to worry — a wobbly toddler raced to help, eagerly handing it back. The simple experiment shows the capacity for altruism emerges as early as 18 months of age.

Toddlers' endearing desire to help out actually signals fairly sophisticated brain development, and is a trait of interest to anthropologists trying to tease out the evolution... posted on Mar 4, 1841 reads

Fearless Heroes
"Caraggio!" Courage! To a woman trapped in a Hitler's torture camp, "caraggio" brought hope and strength in the face of certain death.

It is a great person who can make that word into a mantra to survive. And after the miracle of being rescued; it is an even greater person who keeps going back, in order to save another tortured soul. Ginetta Sagan has celebrated 45 years liberating... posted on Mar 6, 1395 reads

One Class at a Time
In 1998, the children of Whitwell Middle School took on an inspiring project, launched out of their principal's desire to help her students open their eyes to the diversity of the world beyond their insulated valley. What happened would change the students, their teachers, their families and the entire town forever...and eventually open hearts and minds around the world. ... posted on Mar 9, 2040 reads

iPod Decibels
Millions of Walkmans and iPods are sold around the world. Latest research, though, shows that it is only safe to listen to an hour a day at about 60% of the volume. If it's not healthy, why give listeners the option to pump it up to 120 decibels? Pure pleasure, apparently. Using earphones for hours at high volumes basically causes "shock and awe" to delicate hair-like cells deep within the inn... posted on Mar 12, 1797 reads

A Pen Pal for Peace
In the early 80s when America was still in the grip of the Cold War a ten-year-old girl named Samantha Smith wrote a letter to Yuri Andropov, the new leader of the Soviet Union: “Dear Mr. Andropov,” she wrote, “I have been worrying about Russia and the United States getting into a nuclear war. Are you going to have a war or not? If you aren't, please tell me how you are going to help not hav... posted on Mar 25, 1457 reads

The Wisdom of Listening
When Kingshurst Junior, a failing school in a deprived area of the UK, was threatened with closure, one of its teachers stumbled upon the work of Monty Roberts, the famed “Horse Whisperer” known for his ability to tame wild horses in mere minutes without ever using physical force. Kingshurst introduced Roberts' concepts in their classrooms with spectacular results -- today it ranks among the t... posted on Mar 23, 4025 reads

Sacred Gift of the Intuitive Mind
Remarkable, scientifically-based advice for anyone who is struggling to make a difficult decision: Stop thinking about it. For relatively simple decisions, researchers at University of Amsterdam found that it is better to use the rational approach. But the conscious mind can consider only a few facts at a time. And so with complex decisions, like buying a house, the unconscious appears to do a bet... posted on Mar 31, 1665 reads

Planet Read
While taking a break from dissertation writing at Cornell University, Brij Kothari was watching a Spanish film with friends to improve his Spanish. The Spanish movie had English subtitles, and Brij wondered if it came with Spanish subtitles. Suddenly, he had a Eureka moment: "If they just put Hindi subtitles on Bollywood songs in Hindi, India would become literate!" That idea became an obsession.... posted on Apr 2, 1499 reads

Parents of the Year
8,756,093 cans is what it took. For 21 years, working 365 days a year, the Garcias supported their family of five by picking through garbage and selling used cans and bottles. That was until their eldest son, Rogelio, earned his engineering degree from MIT in 2002! "They put aside what people thought of them," said Rogelio. "They put aside the long hours … their tired bodies, because they had... posted on Apr 4, 2062 reads

Lunch Box Light
A neat solution: a child in a developing country goes to school with her lunchbox for her meals, recharges the box in the school's charging station, and the family has light at home for less than half its earlier share. More than 2 billion people worldwide lack access to electric lighting. For example, only 2% of western Kenya has access to grid electrification and 97% of the homes use kerosene w... posted on Apr 8, 1859 reads

Waves of Service
They know how it felt, and now they're reaching out to those going through it. Insafi Gulo was asleep when the Tsunami rocked Indonesia and the five-story building collapsed, trapping her beneath piles of rubble. She eventually freed herself, losing her right foot in the process. Far from being down, a year later, she's come all the way from Indonesia to help Hurricane Katrina victims, ripping out... posted on Apr 5, 1394 reads

Island School
What if the environment was your schoolroom? At the Island School in the Bahamas, it is. Students there find themselves up to their knees in mud while exploring a mangrove creek, face to face with a coral reef 40 feet underwater, or holding a 700 year old pottery shard. As active participants in the educational process, students are taught to think like scientists, cultural historians, and teac... posted on May 20, 3684 reads

A Symbolic Quest for Better Living
A dangerously obese man has captured the heart of America by walking alone across the country to lose weight and find his soul. Steve Vaught was in a car accident in which two people died, sending him into years of depression and comfort eating. Hitting 400+ pounds, he realized that he would die if he carried on. After a year and more than 2300 miles on the road, his journey has become a symbolic ... posted on Apr 13, 2029 reads

Escape from Affluenza
Sometimes a book is so good it gets made into a movie. This time, the movie—a hit documentary on PBS from 1997—got made into a book. Affluenza, the film, began life on TV as a one-hour guided tour of America’s disastrous love affair with shopping. The film was sassy, snappy, and smart, supporting the sneaking intuition that our culture had fallen ill. The trouble? Overconsumption. We work m... posted on Apr 20, 1701 reads

$30,000 Dumpster Dive
Artist Michael Daube was rummaging through a dumpster near his Jersey City loft, looking for sculpture materials, when he came across a David Hockney drawing worth $30,000! The son of a steel worker and a housewife, neither a high school graduate, Michael took off for India. While working at Mother Teresa's mission in Calcutta, he asked her how he might practice compassion $18,000 richer. She sugg... posted on Apr 30, 1516 reads

A Dog with Infinite Patience
Are you the kind of person who has a hard time waiting for anything? Here's some inspiration for you: Hachiko, Japan's most celebrated canine. A dog who walked his owner to the train station every day and came back to receive him in the evening after work. When his owner died one day while at office, this faithful dog refused to go home and waited patiently at the station -- for ten years(!) -- un... posted on Apr 22, 5296 reads

The Hidden Power of Cow Dung
Input: cow dung. Output: enough electricity to light 70 light bulbs, some fertilizer, and heat. Powered by a Stirling engine invented by Dean Kamen, this is an experiment in bringing power to the poor, run by the man who brought cell phones into Bangledesh's Grameen bank, Iqbal Quadir. The idea is that one entrepreneur, funded by a microcredit loan, sets up a business to turn manure into methane g... posted on May 10, 2128 reads

The Trust Network
The most important network in an organization? Some say it's the 'trust network'. Former MIT professor Karen Stephenson teaches that it’s a company's human infrastructure that really determines whether it lives or dies, and knowing who trusts whom is as important as knowing who reports to whom. In this view, organizations have a sort of double-helix system, with hierarchy and networks constantly... posted on May 2, 3265 reads

Real TV
Tired of letting media execs decide what gets aired on TV? Now you can choose, and even create, your own broadcasts. Disenchanted with network and cable news companies, former VP Al Gore launched Current TV, a viewer-generated channel featuring shows on a wide range of topics and diverse views. One popular part of the website is Google Current, a news show based on the day’s top Google keyword s... posted on May 3, 2150 reads

Farming Without A Trace
Can farming and wildlife co-exist? That has been the aim of England’s eighty-some Conservation Grade Farms, farms that grow wildlife as well as crops. Some 10% of the land is set aside to provide natural habitat and food for animals and birds that were once widespread in the British landscape. Currently the demand for the brand is providing these farmers a premium for their crops, enabling them ... posted on May 11, 1525 reads

Taking Notes From The Beatles
What do the most successful music band of all time have to teach management experts about teamwork and creativity? Rewind to February 9, 1964, when the Beatles debut in front of what was then the world's largest TV audience in history. Not your usual flamboyant lead singer with backing musicians -- instead, an electrifying ensemble of four equal players sharing the limelight and having the time of... posted on May 12, 2465 reads

100 Mile Diet
When the average North American sits down to eat, each ingredient has typically travelled at least 1,500 miles ... thereby increasing the use of petroleum products and carbon emission by more than 17 times! On the first day of spring, 2005, Alisa and James chose to confront this unsettling statistic with a simple experiment. For one year, they would buy or gather their food and drink from within... posted on May 18, 2854 reads

Breaking Bread Together
Breaking bread together may well have a positive impact on your health. Nursing home residents who gathered for family-style meals rather than lonely pre-plated ones benefited emotionally and physically, Dutch researchers reported. Those having meals together were able to maintain fine motor skills and body weight much better than those having solo meals. And over six months, they found a relative... posted on May 21, 1696 reads

Temporary Urban PARK(ing)
Feed your parking meter and that space is yours for a certain period of time. While most will park their cars in that public space, a group of activists known as Rebar had a different idea -- convert it into a park! Yes, a park. Last November 16 was the first PARK(ing) project, from noon to 2PM in San Francisco. While 70% of the city's downtown outdoor space is for private vehicles and only a ... posted on May 22, 1812 reads

Double Amputee Scales Everest
47-year-old Mark Inglis was a former mountain rescue guide before he lost both legs to frost bite after being trapped in an ice cave for 14 days. Today he is an honors graduate in human biochemistry, a researcher, silver medal cyclist, a ski instructor, motivational speaker and the first double amputee to have scaled the highest peak in the world! "While it’s a great adventure for me it would be... posted on May 27, 1472 reads

Sons of Lwala
When residents of a tiny Kenyan village sold their chickens and cattle to buy Milton Ochieng's $900 plane ticket to Dartmouth College, they told him they wanted something in return. Eight years later, he's a medical school graduate preparing for his residency. In his home village of Lwala, a clinic he and younger brother Fred established serves about 100 patients a day. A documentary about their s... posted on Oct 7, 3909 reads

Eco-Cities For 400 Million People
Can China move 400 million people to its cities without wreaking environmental havoc? Eco-urban designer William McDonough says yes, that industrial cities could be far more ecologically balanced than they are now if they were designed from the ground up with sustainable principles -- and Beijing is listening. In Huangbaiyu, for instance, McDonough's team is allowed to spend only $3,500 per house.... posted on May 28, 1761 reads

Made With Love Café
It started as a relief project after Hurricane Katrina. But it's still going today -- a volunteer-run kitchen that serves 1500 hot meals a day in New Orleans! "Our meals are free and available to anyone who needs food. We are non-political, non-religious, and hope that by bringing volunteers together from all over we can create a joyful and safe place for residents to begin rebuilding their comm... posted on May 31, 3094 reads

Music of Rosslyn Chapel
For hundreds of years experts and visitors alike have puzzled over the carvings in the Rosslyn chapel. Now, Stuart Mitchell thinks he's cracked part of the code of the ornate ceiling of carved arches, featuring 213 decorated cubes. The breakthrough came when Mitchell's father discovered that the markings matched a pattern that forms when a sustained musical note is used to vibrate a sheet of met... posted on Jun 9, 2560 reads

Mother Teresa's Personal Surgeon
Mother Teresa handpicked him to be her personal surgeon. Today, Dr. Devi Shetty is perhaps the most compassionate, committed and charistmatic thing that has happened to cardiac surgery in the last century. He runs the world's second most productive heart hospital where children under 12 are treated for free and other patients pay whatever they can. Dr. Shetty has delivered high quality cardiac ... posted on Jun 11, 2881 reads

Mass Killer Atones For His Sins
Shyam Narayan Sharma is a bedraggled man noticeable for his garland of old shoes and for wearing sandals and clothes made out of torn jute bags. He has served time in jail after turning himself in for capital crimes. While in jail, Sharma had a personal transformation and "made 600 inmates literate." Upon his release on bail, Dayasagar sold his double-story home to set up a tin shed private sch... posted on Jan 10, 2934 reads

Gates to Become Full-Time Philanthropist
Bill Gates of Microsoft announced that within two years, he plans to transition into full-time work for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the organization he founded with his wife, which focuses on global health and education. "I believe with great wealth comes great responsibility - the responsibility to give back to society and make sure those resources are given back in the best possible w... posted on Jun 18, 1609 reads