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, 1612 reads

America’s Best-Selling Poet
Madonna has set translations of his verse to music, Donna Karan uses it as background to her fashion shows and Oliver Stone wants to make a movie on his life. Who is he? Jalalludin Rumi, the mystic-poet born in Central Asia almost eight centuries ago! The man most responsible for Rumi's current popularity in the West is Coleman Barks, a retired professor of English whose translations of Rumi’s ... posted on Jun 20, 2430 reads

The World's Most Courteous City
We hear a lot about how common courtesy is a dying art form. Recently Readers Digest conducted a survey to find out if good manners are indeed going out of style. Contrary to popular belief they found civility was alive and well -- in a place where you’d least expect it: New York City! Survey-takers in major cities across 35 countries used three experiments: "door tests" (would anyone hold one o... posted on Jun 27, 1949 reads

Nascan Archaeological Enigma
In the Pampa Colorada (Red Plain) of the Peruvian Desert, there are huge geometric patterns and spirals, animal figures and thousands of perfectly straight lines that go on for kilometers. These drawings are known as the Nazca lines -- one of the world’s most baffling enigmas of archeology. They were most likely drawn by the Nazca Natives approximately 2,000 years ago! Interestingly though, thes... posted on Jul 2, 2388 reads

When Travel Is The Best Medicine
For years Michael McColly had no bed, no furniture and lived out of a suitcase. When he contracted H.I.V. in 1995 doctors warned him against traveling. But McColly decided to heed his inner voice instead. "Travel has become my antidote: the farther I go the more aware I become of what has kept me alive -- my desire to be in and of the world ... If I had listened to the fears of people I know or re... posted on Jul 6, 1893 reads

Legendary Doctor Passes On
Dr. V(enkataswamy), the legendary eye surgeon from South India, who with his own two hands restored the sight of over 100,000 people, passed away late last week. His work resulted in one of the world's most extraordinary models of service delivery. Thirty years ago, at the age of 58, he started an 11-bed eye clinic in an old temple-city, and with his team, turned Aravind Eye Care System into the l... posted on Jul 10, 2065 reads

The Science of TV Addiction
The term "TV addiction" is imprecise and laden with value judgments, but it captures the essence of a very real phenomenon. On average, individuals in the industrialized world devote three hours a day to the pursuit -- fully half of their leisure time, and more than on any single activity save work and sleep. At this rate, someone who lives to 75 would spend nine years in front of the tube! This S... posted on Jul 14, 2235 reads

A Formula for Beauty
Can beauty be measured? 20th century mathematician George David Birkhoff actually made a life quest of exactly that. Though best known for his work on differential equations and dynamics, he also had a keen interest in aesthetics -- the qualities that make a painting, sculpture, song, or poem pleasing to the eye, ear, or mind. Interestingly enough, Birkhoff sought a formula, a mathematical measure... posted on Jul 16, 2520 reads

Turning Water Into Child's Play
The children push the merry-go-round again and again. As they run, a device in the ground beneath them begins to turn. With every rotation of the merry-go-round, water is pumped out of a well, up through a pipe, and into a tank high above the playground. A few feet away from all the fun, students in uniform turn on a tap. Clean, cold drinking water pours out. This is Motshegofadiwa Primary School... posted on Jul 22, 1861 reads

The 'Good' Magazine
Ben Goldhirsh was always broke, even though his father was worth $200 million. But when Bernie Goldhirsh faced brain cancer, he started having his son tag along to all his meetings. One day, Bernie gave $20 million to his employees and made Ben listen to every stunned, grateful voicemail. Then he put most of his son's inheritance in a trust that would pay out in installments over the next few deca... posted on Jul 23, 2336 reads

Dollar a Day Walking Pilgrimage
It isn't easy living on a dollar a day, even when you're trekking through poverty-stricken parts of rural India. Just ask Nipun and Guri Mehta, who held themselves to that budget while taking a walking pilgrimage through the country last year. Six months into their marriage, this Berkeley couple left with a one-way ticket to journey India by foot. Eating wherever food was offered, sleeping wherev... posted on Aug 7, 3226 reads

Homeless World Cup
Imagine a World Cup played only by homeless players. Well, it's happening in Cape Town in less than 2 months! Mel Young, social entrepreneur and co-founder of the Homeless World Cup, says, "It creates a different environment. In Edinburgh last year, homeless people were playing football in the same square in which they'd been begging. They'd been spat at, the police had hassled them -- all we did ... posted on Aug 6, 1743 reads

The Clock of the Long Now
We can often find ourselves living for the moment instead of in it. Prompted by this fast (and getting faster) lifestyle of our world, a handful of key high-tech thinkers from San Francisco recently created the Long Now Foundation to provide a counterpoint to today's "faster/cheaper" mind set and promote "slower/better" thinking. Read this essay by a founding member of Long Now on The Ten Thousa... posted on Aug 13, 3169 reads

How Soccer Explains The World
Female soccer fans in Iran set aside the 'hijab' to celebrate the national team's victory halfway across the globe. Brazilian managers swindle American corporations abroad and exploit their own players at home. Undisciplined soccer stars from Nigeria are sold to Ukrainian teams and forced to adapt to chess-like coaching strategies in the dead of winter. Globalization never seems so vivid as when s... posted on Aug 17, 1490 reads

A Village Goes Online
An Indian village has uploaded itself onto the Internet, giving the outside world a glimpse of life in rural India. Visitors to Hansdehar village's website can see the names, jobs and other details of its 1,753 residents, browse photographs of their shops and read detailed specifications about their drainage and electricity facilities.... posted on Aug 19, 2342 reads

Friedman Prize for Liberty
The former prime minister of Estonia, Mart Larr recently won the 2006 Friedman Prize for Liberty. He says, "I had read only one book on economics -- Milton Friedman's Free to Choose. I was so ignorant at the time that I thought that what Friedman wrote about the benefits of privatization, the flat tax and the abolition of all customs rights, was the result of economic reforms that had been put in... posted on Sep 2, 1302 reads

Strongest Dad in the World
Eighty-five times he's pushed the wheelchair of his disabled son, Rick, in marathons. Eight times in addition to pushing the wheelchair for 26.2 miles he's also towed him 2.4 miles in a dinghy while swimming, and pedaled him 112 miles in a seat on the handlebars -- all in the same day. When technology allowed Rick to type, he said: "Dad, when we were running, it felt like I wasn't disabled anym... posted on Sep 6, 2762 reads

Emotionally Sensitive Computers
Emotionally sensitive computers? The aggression of frustrated computer users towards their machines is a growing and increasingly costly problem. To address this unusual situation, scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute are re-examining communication between man and machine, to see if computers can be made to respond to what their users feel. Using devices that track pulse rate, body temperature, ... posted on Sep 17, 1494 reads

The Dangers of Venting Anger
The centuries-old idea that vigorously expressing or 'venting' anger is both helpful and healthy is now being disproved. Recent studies reveal that anger can be more destructive when expressed than when it's suppressed. "Talking out an emotion doesn't reduce it, it rehearses it," says Dr Travis, a social psychologist. Researchers in alignment with her theory say that by venting' rage, you're often... posted on Sep 8, 2454 reads

70 Best-Loved Words
We each have a special relationship to the words we use, and our vocabulary often reflects our way of relating to the world. An intriguing survey conducted by the British Council collected and compiled the top 70 favorite words of the English language. The Council asked more than 7,000 learners in 46 countries what they considered the most beautiful English words. "It's interesting that mother, th... posted on Sep 12, 14928 reads

Why The Brain Needs Breaks
In our fast-paced information-saturated world, what role does down-time really play? Researchers at MIT say that regular breaks in brain activity are key to forming memories. Their fascinating work supports earlier research showing that animals and people learn best when information isn't crammed together. "Perhaps we don't take breaks seriously enough," researcher David Foster says. "Perhaps we'r... posted on Sep 19, 2269 reads