The Woman Who Gave Away College Educations
Oral Lee Brown is on a mission to get Oakland kids into college. It's a commitment she made on the spur of the moment two decades ago."I don't know where it came from, but in my wildest imagination I would never have been involved with kids," says Brown. In 1987 on the spur of the moment she promised a first grade class of 23 students a free college education. Brown isn't the only person to send k... posted on Oct 5, 2699 reads

Tsunami Service
This time last year, Andy Brash had just finished his carpentry apprenticeship in Scotland, Patricia Byron was living in south London with the youngest of her eight children and Aaron Sangster was backpacking in Australia. But that was before the tsunami. Now all three are living in Thailand, each giving what they can to rebuild the devastated resort town of Khao Lak.... posted on Dec 26, 1520 reads

Heart of the Matter
The heart produces an electric field 60 times stronger than that produced by the brain, and it's electromagnetic field is 5000 stronger than the field generated by the brain. This is why the quality of the variation of the heart beat can also subtly influence people who are in our proximity. ... posted on Dec 29, 1821 reads

Helping The Children Left Behind
While mentoring and inspiring elementary kids in a low income neighborhood of Roxbury, Massachusetts, Harvard Law student Earl Phalen learned the hard truth about how far behind these kids were academically. Out of his living room he set out to change that by launching BELL (Building Educated Leaders for Life), a rigorous after-school program that now serves 7,000 kids in four cities. The results,... posted on Dec 30, 1071 reads

Year Up
As a Big Brother volunteer while working on Wall Street, Gerald Chertavian, 39, "saw that urban young adults, who are wonderfully talented, supersmart and capable, didn't have a path into the mainstream." For his business school essay, he wrote about starting a school that would fix that. In 1999 Gerald turned that essay into a reality with Year Up, a school that provides 18-24 adult from disadva... posted on Jan 3, 1585 reads

Social Capitalists
How long has it been since you were surprised by hope? As you browsed the morning newspaper, when did you last feel a sense that the world was becoming a better place? That the forces propelling the future were on the right track? That the power of imagination was serving those with healing ideals rather than those with darker agendas? Wait no more. Fast Company's 2006 Social Capitalist Award hi... posted on Jan 5, 1932 reads

Women in Politics
The world witnessed some major political achievements for women in 2005, which included the election of Africa's first female president and Germany's first woman chancellor. Last year also saw the highest percentage of female members of parliament worldwide, 16.1%, up from 11.7% eight years ago. ... posted on Jan 6, 1435 reads

Applying Technology to a Good Cause
Hamish Fraser, Partners In Health's Director of Informatics and Telemedicine, has earned a new title – "do-gooder." Fraser was one of a half-dozen people singled out by Red Herring magazine in early January for a cover story featuring "Six Who’ve Applied Tech to a Good Cause." ... posted on Mar 1, 1277 reads

Banking Change
When Dutch artist Van den Baar needed a loan for a new space to live and work, he faced a lot of furrowed brows among the bankers who considered his loan too risky. Van den Baar finally found his mortgage in a bank that didn’t see artists so much as financial risks but important players in the effort to create a sustainable society. For the past 25 years, Triodos Bank, a $1.2 billion institutio... posted on Jan 14, 1510 reads

Honey Bee Network
Think of a honeybee: it collects its pollen from the flowers, but benefits them rather than improverishing them. Much in the same way, Anil Gupta -- a professor at Indian Institute of Management -- started the HoneyBee Network, a grassroot entrepreneurship program where ideas are produced by village entrepreneurs. Under Professor Gupta's inspiration, the network has captured thousands of inventi... posted on Jan 19, 1943 reads

Since Sliced Bread
What's your best idea since sliced bread, in 176 words or less? That's the question that SEIU asked to everyday folks. Winner gets $100,000 and two finalists get $50,000 each. Of the 22,000 folks that responded, 21 ideas were selected as finalists ... ranging from creating a Civil Work Corps to starting tax-free savings accounts at work for first-time homebuyers to providing free or low-cost w... posted on Jan 25, 1461 reads

Research Links Meditation With Compassion
Like athletes or musicians, people who practice meditation can enhance their ability to concentrate -- or even lower their blood pressure. They can also cultivate compassion, according to a new study. Specifically, concentrating on the loving kindness one feels toward one's family (and expanding that to include strangers) physically affects brain regions that play a role in empathy."There is such ... posted on Oct 26, 2799 reads

Paradox of Choice
A radio producer in Washington, D.C., got a promotion a few years ago on the grounds that he was a "good decision-maker." Self-deprecating to a fault, he reminded his bosses that many of the decisions he'd made since joining the station hadn't exactly worked out. They didn’t care. "Being a good decision-maker means you’re good at making decisions," one executive cheerily told him. "It doesn’... posted on Jan 29, 1727 reads

Infinite Worth
On the site of an old copper paint factory and whiskey warehouse in Baltimore, stands the eclectic American Visionary Art Museum. Founded by former psychiatric nurse, Rebecca Hoffberger, on the idea that each of us has unlimited creative potential, the museum trumpets the wonders of raw human creativity by featuring art work from self-taught individuals with no formal training. ... posted on Jan 31, 1424 reads

Dolphin Telepathy
Dolphins don't keep secrets. According a recent study, wild dolphins listen in on one another's echolocation clicks, which in addition to telling where food may be, also carries all sorts of complex information about whether a dolphin is pregnant, what mood it's in, and what's around it. This may be a contributing factor to the evolution of cooperative behavior in dolphins.... posted on Feb 5, 2346 reads

Cultural Capital
A child growing up in a family earning over $90,000 has a 1 in 2 chance of getting a college degree by age 24; a child in a family earning $35,000 to $61,000 has a 1 in 10 chance; a child in a family earning under $35,000 has a 1 in 17 chance. Yet the main problem is not that poor students can't afford college; nor is the main problem that these poorer students don't have access to college. The ... posted on Feb 11, 969 reads

Clean
A self-cleaning bathroom is on the way. Nanotechnology may yet rescue us from the drudgery of the weekly ritual of blitzing the bathroom. Scientists in Australia have developed an environmentally friendly coating containing special nanoparticles that could do the job of cleaning and disinfecting for us. ... posted on Feb 13, 1268 reads

Olympic Green
Organizers of the Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, promise that their games will be "the greenest ever." They have vowed to put together a "carbon neutral" event—meaning it will have no net impact on climate change—by investing in forestry, energy efficiency, and other measures to offset carbon dioxide emissions from the event. ... posted on Feb 15, 1187 reads

Jason McElwain
Jason McElwain, an autistic high school basketball team member in Rochester NY, served as the team manager and spirit coach for several years. On the final game of the season the coach let him finally put on a uniform with the rest of the team. What happened next you have to see to believe... ... posted on Feb 25, 9605 reads

A Path With Heart
Optimists seem less likely to die of heart disease or stroke than pessimistic people, a Dutch study says. The Delfland Institute of Mental Health study of 545 men found the most optimistic were about half as likely to die from cardiovascular disease. Researchers thought it was likely to be because optimists exercised more and were better at coping with adversity, the Archives of Internal Medicine... posted on Mar 2, 1725 reads

The Miracle of Positive Thinking
Wake Forest University researchers found in a recent study that positive thinking reduced activity in parts of the brain that process pain information, and was as powerful as an actual shot of morphine in relieving the pain.... posted on Mar 10, 2711 reads

Hopi Runners
Relying on their own feet and centuries of tradition, Hopi Native American runners 12 to 75 years of age will run from their desert mesa homelands of Arizona some 1,500 miles south to Mexico starting March 2. Although they don't have an official invitation, the Hopi will carry an ancient message about water to Mexico City's 4th World Water Forum: a spiritual ceremony to place water as a living sen... posted on Mar 15, 1480 reads

Restoring A Tropical Rainforest
Half a century after most of Costa Rica's rain forests were cut down, researchers from the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Sciences on the Cornell campus are attempting what many thought was impossible -- restoring a tropical rain forest ecosystem. When the researchers planted worn-out cattle pastures in Costa Rica with a sampling of local trees in the early 1990s, native species of plants bega... posted on Nov 16, 2505 reads

Pros Work With Cons
When she chanced upon a tour of the Texas prison, venture capitalist Catherine Rohr soon discovered a surprising pool of entrepreneurial talent right there in the prison. Chucking her VC job, she started the Prison Entrepreneurship Program that uses Fortune 500-type business executives as volunteer mentors, harnesses the entrepreneurial skills inmates had demonstrated while running the successful... posted on Mar 14, 1427 reads

Heart of Gold
For Olympic speed skater Joey Cheek, it was a magical moment — winning a gold medal — that turned into something even more meaningful. "After years of other people sacrificing so that I can be the best in the world, I feel that it is imperative to give something to someone who's less fortunate than myself." Cheek used his time in the limelight to channel support for kids in war-torn countries... posted on Mar 18, 2875 reads

Small Clicks with Great Love
What if you could have money donated to good causes every time you searched the internet? Welcome, GoodSearch.com, a Yahoo-powered search engine that has developed a way to track and redirect a portion of its proceeds so that with each search, 50 percent of the revenue generated by advertisers goes to the school or charity selected by the user.... posted on Mar 22, 1728 reads

Found Art
You are finishing up your usual overpriced latte in your local java joint when you notice it at the next table -- a tiny sculpted wall plaque leaning against the sugar caddy. You look around, wondering whether someone forgot it. It has a sticker on it saying "Found Art!" with a Web address. Suddenly, it clicks: You've just found a free piece of art and an invitation to join a growing global art pr... posted on Apr 3, 1961 reads

49,000 Grandmothers of Nepal
Twenty years ago, Nepal's infant-mortality rate was 133 for every 1,000 births, with most of the babies claimed by pneumonia and diarrhea. By the 1980s, they had found the culprit -- lack of Vitamin A in the Nepalese diet. But no one could implement an effective program to deliver a low-cost vitamin-A capsule that could be taken as infrequently as twice a year. That was until Ram Shrestha hit up... posted on Apr 26, 2766 reads

From Guns to Guitars
He is a classically trained musician and composer who studied at Colombia's best conservatory. But instead of concert hall performances Cesar Lopez plays on the streets of Bogota. There’s something that speaks even louder: his musical instrument looks much like a Winchester Rifle. That’s because it used to be one. But now, six metal guitar strings are threaded over the weapon's barrel, ending ... posted on May 8, 1884 reads

Japan's Carbon Footprint Labels
Japan is planning to label consumer goods to show their carbon footprints in a bid to raise public awareness about global warming, an official said Tuesday. Under the plan, a select range of products from beverages to detergent will carry markings on the carbon footprint -- or how much gas responsible for global warming has been emitted through production and delivery. The ministry's research show... posted on Oct 4, 3788 reads

Urban Takes Over Rural
Sometime this year, a woman will give birth in the Lagos slum of Ajegunle, a young man will flee his village in west Java for the bright lights of Jakarta, or a farmer will move his impoverished family into one of Lima’s innumerable pueblos jovenes. The exact event is unimportant and it will pass entirely unnoticed. Nonetheless it will constitute a watershed in human history. For the first time ... posted on Jun 2, 1737 reads

Alabama's Anniston Star
At many newspapers, the top priority is how best to prop up revenues. But the family that owns 'The Anniston Star' in Alabama is quietly planning to devote the paper's profits to training new generations of reporters. The Star is a small daily that packs an outsized punch, situated in a town west of Atlanta. The paper has a circulation of just 27,000. But it fights above its weight class -- they ... posted on Jun 14, 1663 reads

Kids on Love
A group of adults posed this question to a group of 4 to 8 year-olds: "What does love mean?" The answers were broader and deeper than anyone could have imagined. One 6-year old wrote, "If you want to learn to love better, you should start with a friend who you hate."... posted on Dec 29, 642742 reads

Doc Pauses Surgery, Gives Patient Blood
Open heart surgery does require a patient's heart to be opened, but how often is it that the doctor's heart must also be open? Dr. Samuel Weinstein had started a critical operation on an 8-year-old patient about 12 hours earlier, when they started running out of the rare-type blood to give the boy. So what does Dr. Weinstein, who was volunteering his cardiac surgery skills in El Salvador, do? He t... posted on Jun 17, 1657 reads

Volunteer Computing Fights Cancer
Researcher David Baker believes the key to an AIDS vaccine or a cure for cancer may be that old PC sitting in your closet or the one idling on your desk. Baker, 43, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Washington, realized that he didn't have access to the computing horsepower needed for his research — nor the money to buy time on supercomputers elsewhere. So he turned to the kindnes... posted on Jun 22, 1701 reads

Mystic of the Holocaust
Little is known of the external life of Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish woman who lived in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation, one of the millions who suffered during the Holocaust. This obscurity is in contrast with her well-documented internal life. Etty Hillesum wrote in her diary: "Sometimes when I stand in some corner of the camp, my feet planted on earth, my eyes raised towards heaven, tears... posted on Jun 26, 2149 reads

10-Second Film Festival
Too often, thought Chris Pennington, people don't consider what they create to be art because their perceptions of "real art" are limited to what they see in elite museums. So what did he do? Create a film festival, where filmmakers weren't allowed to create their movies with real video cameras. Rather, they used digital cameras and camera-equipped cell phones to create unedited films that last no... posted on Jul 12, 1914 reads

Anonymous Kindness Catches On!
Before Bob Haslam had a chance to thank her, she was gone. In the drive-up lane at a Starbucks in Lynnwood, Haslam reached out for his usual nonfat raspberry latte with two Splendas stirred in, but the barista wouldn't take his money. "She leaned way out and said, 'You're not going to believe this, but the lady ahead of you paid for your latte. She said she wanted to make your day.'" Events like... posted on Jul 20, 2125 reads

Bus Stand Autobiographies
An incarcerated person, a bilingual 5th grader, and a former go-go dancer are among 20 people whose creative autobiographies are on display at bus shelters throughout Philadelphia! It's all part of the 'Autobiography Project' to commemorate the 300th birthday of Benjamin Franklin. After inviting residents to share their own life stories, in 300 words or less, these inspirations were plastered as... posted on Jul 21, 2252 reads

Homeless Man Rewarded By Honesty
Charles Moore stumbled across $21,000 worth of savings bonds while rummaging through a trash can for reusable bottles. The 59-year-old homeless man off the streets of Detroit turned the bonds in at a homeless shelter that then tracked down their rightful owner. Moore was given $100 by the owner for his honesty. But citizens from around the country moved by his integrity have stepped forward to han... posted on Aug 4, 2498 reads

Nobel Laureate Aims for Open-source Research
Harold Varmus won a Nobel Prize for changing how we think about cancer. Then he overhauled the National Institutes of Health. Now he’s battling to make all scientific research free and universally available. Varmus is the most visible character in the movement to free the scientific world of scholarly journals that restrict the flow of information by charging often hefty subscription prices for ... posted on Aug 5, 1821 reads

A Grieving Mother's Incredible Compassion
As the fourteen year old L'mani Delima apologized for pulling the trigger of a .38-caliber pistol five times and killing 12-year-old Phoenix Garrett, the victim's mother had one request for the judge: "Can I hug him, please?" The mother of the Harlem child, Jacqueline Birkett-Johnson, wanted the young man to know he could change the direction of his life. "I wanted him to know before he left tha... posted on Aug 11, 2628 reads

Emotion Rules The Brain
The evidence has been piling up throughout history, and now neuroscientists have proved that it's true: The brain's wiring emphatically relies on emotion over intellect in decision-making.... posted on Aug 14, 3264 reads

Canadian Index of Well Being
A new Canadian index will gauge how people are faring overall, not just how much they're spending. The Canadian Index of Wellbeing hopes to be more accurate than its economic cousin, the gross domestic product (GDP). "GDP tells us how much total income we're producing but tells us nothing about how that income is distributed," says Roy Romanow, the former Saskatchewan premier who chaired the 200... posted on Aug 20, 1962 reads

Prisoners Fast to Aid Starving Kenyans
Tens of thousands of prisoners skipped lunch Sunday to send food to fellow Kenyans affected by food shortages, a senior prison official said. Most of Kenya's estimated 50,000 prisoners gave up their beans and corn porridge on the day that President Mwai Kibaki declared the drought-caused food shortages a national disaster in an effort to speed relief efforts.... posted on Aug 23, 1476 reads

From Garbage To Gold
Two years ago, Eli Reich was a mechanical engineer consultant for a Seattle wind energy company when his messenger bag was stolen. Reich, who rode his bike to work every day, decided that instead of buying a new one, he would simply fashion another bag out of used bicycle-tire inner tubes that were lying around his house. Soon compliments on his sturdy black handmade messenger bag turned into req... posted on Sep 5, 1842 reads

Islamic Revival in Syria Is Led by Women
In Syria, Women are in the vanguard. Though men across the Islamic world usually interpret Scripture and lead prayers, Syria, virtually alone in the Arab world, is seeing the resurrection of a centuries-old tradition of sheikhas, or women who are religious scholars. The growth of girls’ madrasas has outpaced those for boys, Syrian religious teachers say.... posted on Sep 18, 1186 reads

Poverty is all in the Brain?
Elizabeth Gould overturned one of the central tenets of neuroscience. Now she’s building on her discovery to show that poverty and stress may not just be symptoms of society, but bound to our anatomy. "Poverty is stress," she says. "One thing that always strikes me is that when you ask Americans why the poor are poor, they always say it's because they don’t work hard enough, or don't want to... posted on Sep 4, 3919 reads

China: World's Third Largest Food Donor
Is giving a natural extension of receiving? China seems to have an inspiring answer to that question! In 2005, the same year it stopped receiving food aid from the World Food Program, China emerged as the world’s third largest food aid donor. According to the latest annual Food Aid Monitor from INTERFAIS, the International Food Aid Information System, China accounted for more than half of the ri... posted on Sep 14, 2921 reads

The Art of Disappearing
The simple yet profound lines in the quote above are from American-Arab poet Naomi Nye's piece, "The Art of Disappearing". Bill Moyers from PBS was so moved by this poem that he carried a copy of it folded in his wallet after undergoing heart surgery. In this inspiring interview the two discuss everything from poetry as a form of conversation, what it means to 'breathe in two countries', and the u... posted on Sep 16, 2005 reads