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, 1662 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, 642675 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

Advertising for Global Good
Never in the storied history of the Barcelona Football Club (Barca) has the club carried the emblem of a corporate sponsor as the frontispiece of its shirt. Barca has stood almost completely alone in this for over 100 years, until this week, when it joined the ranks of those who advertise. But not in the way one might expect. Barca has unveiled a sponsorship deal with UNICEF, the UN agency founded... posted on Sep 20, 1566 reads

Dime A Day Keeps Junk Mail Away
Junk mail isn't just annoying: it has a detrimental environmental impact. To deliver 800 million pounds of annual junk mail, 100 million trees are cut down each year to produce the ads and non-profit solicitations that likely end up in the recycle bin, or, more often, the trash can. Enter Green Dimes. Greendimes is a company that offers to keep you off junk-mail lists while planting one tree ev... posted on Sep 30, 1815 reads

One Million Meditate for Peace
On October 2, 2006, Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday, the ancient city of Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka is expected to host 1 million people -- the largest gathering in the country’s history -- in an interfaith meditation for peace called together by the Sarvodaya Movement. According to Dr. A.T. Ariyaratne, founder-president of the Movement, the October 2 event is "an attempt to transform the collective ... posted on Oct 1, 2153 reads

Discovering Collective Wisdom
Call it collective consciousness, team synergy, co-intelligence, or group mind -- a growing number of people are discovering through their own experience that wholes are indeed far more than the sum of their parts; that when individuals come together with a shared intention, in a conducive environment, something mysterious can come into being. If you've never read a book about this "collective int... posted on Oct 8, 3018 reads

The Compassion of Elephants
Grace, of a family of elephants that researchers call the Virtues, touches the ailing Eleanor, the matriarch of the First Ladies family, who has fallen in Kenya's Samburu National Reserve on October 10, 2003. Grace will soon push Eleanor back to her feet, though the ailing elephant's resurgence will be short-lived. Elephants show compassionate behavior to others in distress, even to elephants not ... posted on Oct 9, 3019 reads

New York, Melting Shot
New York City may not be the center of the world, but NYChildren, a new photo series, is beguiling proof that the Big Apple sits at the world's crossroads. With 192 countries out there, the project aims to capture an image of a child from each. The caveat? All the children must now live in New York. When it started, the project, headed by photographer Danny Goldfield, was about the pictures. Now D... posted on Oct 19, 1526 reads

The Wisdom of Crowdsourcing
Remember when outsourcing was the buzzword? Well, the new concept is “crowdsourcing:” everyday people using their spare cycles to create content, solve problems, even do corporate R & D. Just as distributed computing projects like UC Berkeley’s SETI@home have tapped the unused processing power of millions of individual computers, so distributed labor networks are using the Internet to levera... posted on Nov 14, 1548 reads

Top Scientists Forecast Future
What will be the biggest breakthrough of the next 50 years? As part of their 50th anniversary celebrations, the New Scientist magazine asked over 70 of the world's most brilliant scientists for their ideas. In coming decades will we: discover that we are not alone in the universe? Unravel the physiological basis for consciousness? Routinely have false memories implanted in our minds? Begin to ev... posted on Nov 22, 2342 reads

The Challenges of Everyday Ethics
From our friendships to our jobs to our conduct in public, seemingly small decisions often pose tough ethical dilemmas, says Joshua Halberstam, author of "Everyday Ethics: Inspired Solutions to Moral Dilemmas". In his words, "While the usual moral evaluations of societies tend to focus on such broad issues as crime, economic equity, and foreign policy, just as important to consider is the moral he... posted on Dec 20, 2737 reads

Teen Returns $24,000 Found in Theater
Imagine stumbling upon $24,000 in cash. What would you do with the money? The untraceable wad of $100 bills, rubber-banded together inside a zippered bank pouch, tumbled unnoticed from the purse of RoseMarie Limoncelli, a business owner, as she sat in a theater with her 8 year-old daughter. On the way home, she realized what had happened. "My heart stopped," she said. "My whole body was shaking." ... posted on Dec 21, 1820 reads

Research Backs Happiness as a Process
While books on happiness abound, very little research has been done on how people become happier. In fact, many researchers have considered that quest to be futile. But recent long-term studies have revealed that the happiness thermostat is more malleable than the popular theory maintained. One easy way that sounds almost trite but has actually been shown to work? Every night, think of three good ... posted on Dec 22, 2972 reads

Inspiring Story Behind Teach For America
Wendy Kopp proposed starting a sort of Peace Corps for teachers in 1989 -- a program that would recruit fellow Ivy Leaguers to teach for two years in the nation's toughest schools, and got a surprising response: "My dear Ms. Kopp, you are quite evidently deranged." Today, Teach for America, as Kopp's program came to be known, is one of the most respected initiatives in American education. This Jun... posted on Dec 29, 2314 reads

Transforming an Ailing School
Betsy Rogers is no ordinary teacher. After being named National Teacher of the Year in 2003, she switched to Brighton School –- one of Alabama’s poorest schools, with the longest run on the county's school-improvement list. Most Brighton teachers have fewer than five years of experience, and at the end of the 2004-05 school year, the school had failed to meet the state's testing goals for seve... posted on Jan 7, 2398 reads

Shared Shopping Sabbatical
Last year, 10 environmentally conscious friends wondered what it would be like to go a year without buying anything new. Twelve months later, the results from their experiment are in. While broken vacuum cleaners and malfunctioning cell phones posed challenges, the group says their shopping sabbatical was so liberating that some have resolved to do it again! The pledge they named The Compact soon ... posted on Jan 11, 3224 reads

Happiness 101
A positive-psychology class called the Science of Well-Being -— essentially a class in how to make yourself happier -— at George Mason University in Virginia is a challenge for positive psychologists. It is one of the 15 unhappiest campuses in America, at least per The Princeton Review. The class is taught by Todd Kashdan, a 32-year-old psychology professor whose area of research is "curiosity... posted on Feb 1, 3764 reads

The Big Impact of Small Interactions
According to Nobel Prize-winning scientist Daniel Kahneman, we experience approximately 20,000 individual moments in a waking day. Each "moment" lasts a few seconds. If you consider any strong memory -- positive or negative -- you'll notice that the imagery in your mind is actually defined by your recollection of a precise point in time. And rarely does a neutral encounter stay in your mind -- the... posted on Feb 22, 3186 reads

The Science of Sleep and Learning
When practicing a musical piece, a gymnastics move, or any other activity that depends on effortless, virtually automatic execution, here's some memory-enhancing advice: If you snooze, you cruise. That, at least, is the implication of two studies in which people who practiced certain tasks performed them better on ensuing trials if they were first allowed to get some sleep. Moreover, one investiga... posted on Feb 28, 2797 reads

Why We Laugh
Laughter, a topic that has baffled philosophers for 2,000 years, is finally yielding to science. Researchers have now traced the evolution of laughter back to an unexpected discovery: laughter has little to do with humor. It’s an instinctual survival tool for social animals, not an intellectual response to wit. In other words, it’s not about getting the joke; it’s about getting along. Resear... posted on Mar 15, 5176 reads

Running A Marathon On Crutches
For most of his career, cameraman Angus Macfadyen enjoyed a fast-paced lifestyle, dashing off to exotic countries or war-torn locations to film. His life changed abruptly when a severe accident forced him into a plaster cast for four months. During that period Angus made an unusual decision: he decided to run a marathon -– on crutches. Marathon officials gave him the green signal, and his grueli... posted on Mar 22, 3350 reads

Billionaire Opens Home To Homeless
Dorie-Ann Kahale and her five daughters moved from a homeless shelter to a mansion last Thursday, courtesy of a Japanese real estate mogul who is handing over eight of his multimillion-dollar homes to low-income Native Hawaiian families. Tears spilled down Kahale's cheeks, as she accepted from billionaire Genshiro Kawamoto, the key to a white, columned house. Kawamoto, whose own eyes started welli... posted on Mar 25, 1809 reads

The World Map of Happiness
Adrian White, an analytic social psychologist at Leicester University's School of Psychology, produced the first ever 'world map of happiness' with Denmark, Switzerland, Austria taking the top three spots. "There is increasing political interest in using measures of happiness as a national indicator in conjunction with measures of wealth," he added. A recent BBC survey found that 81% of the pop... posted on Oct 23, 5408 reads

Violin Virtuoso Goes Incognito
He emerges from the Washington Metro and positions himself against a bare wall. Joshua Bell is one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. A onetime child prodigy, 39-year-old Bell usually plays for standing-room-only audiences so respectful of his artistry that they stifle their coughs until... posted on Apr 11, 3733 reads

The Poetry of Peace
Ten years ago every school around the world was invited to submit two lines of poetry about peace to the United Nations. Once collected, the lines were collated together into one long Peace Poem. Poems came in from 38 countries around the world. Says Kofi Annan in his preface, "In their wisdom, the children whose intermingled voices gave birth to the Peace Poem know that peace is far more than the... posted on Apr 25, 4241 reads

Seven Simple Health Habits
Lester Breslow, popularly referred to as "Mr. Public Health", is the outspoken visionary whose research played a significant role in asserting that simple lifestyle changes could drastically improve overall health. His landmark studies in Alameda county following the health habits of 7,000 people for 35 years resulted in the 'Seven Secrets': a list of daily health habits that proved strong indicat... posted on Apr 26, 7215 reads

Shared World, Shared Words
The inspiring Arab-American poet, Naomi Shihab Nye, wrapped a poem around an unexpected experience of both distress and kindness that she encountered at an airport in Albuquerque. She sent it off to exactly two friends, who passed it on to friends, who passed it on to friends. At a recent reading of the poem, Nye ended the evening remarking that this spontaneous series of people passing the poem o... posted on May 3, 0 reads

Insights From a Blind Pilot
As a child, Miles Hilton-Barber wanted to be a pilot -- not an uncommon ambition among the young. But his is no ordinary story. When his plane touched down recently in Sydney, he became the first blind man to fly half-way around the world. His hope is to raise $1.2 million for Seeing is Believing, an organization that restores sight in developing countries. "When I went blind, they said you’d n... posted on May 2, 2431 reads

A Basketall Superstar's Turning Point
NBA All-Star Kevin Johnson never forgot the inner-city Sacramento neighborhood where he grew up. In 1989, he returned to his hometown to launch a nonprofit afterschool program that is now his full-time passion. Why? His freshman year at University of California, Berkeley, when a professor asked how many people knew what "euphemism" meant, 31 out of 32 students raised their hands. Johnson wasn't on... posted on May 5, 1882 reads

A Prisoner's Last Request
53-year-old Philip Workman's final request before his execution in Nashville, Tennessee touched thousands of people. He requested that his final meal be a vegetarian pizza donated to any homeless person located near Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. When Prison officials refused, saying that they do not donate to charities, a deeply moved public joined hands to fulfill the request. Homeless ... posted on May 11, 2446 reads

Music As A Tool For Learning
Plenty of elementary schools teach music, but how many require students to attend a 45-minute music class every day, to take half-hour violin lessons twice a week, and to practice every night? How many organize the entire educational experience around music? There's a waiting list of more than 600 for a spot in the Conservatory Lab Charter School, an elementary school for mostly low-income Boston ... posted on Jun 2, 1774 reads

Dogs Think More Than We Know
Dog owners have long maintained that their pooches have a lot more going on between their furry ears than scientists acknowledge. Now, new research is adding to the growing evidence that man's best friend thinks a lot more than many humans have believed. The provocative new experiment indicated that dogs can do something that previously only humans, including infants, have been shown capable of do... posted on Jun 10, 3188 reads

A Little Boy Says 'Thank You'
Told he needed a tonsil operation at the age of three, Ben Grocock was terrified. So terrified, he insisted he would never speak again if the surgery went ahead. His parents brushed off his threat (he was three, after all) and the operation took place. But when Ben awoke, he stuck to what became his final word. For the next ten years he retreated into a world of silence. Until now. At 13, Ben has ... posted on Jun 23, 2282 reads