Sunday, January 30, 2011 Not Without My Daughters  Pharmacologist and medical researcher Vimala Seshadri lives with 10 girls between the ages of 4 and 20 who come from underprivileged backgrounds. "We're an all-women household," says Vimala, who has brought up the girls as her own daughters in a small home in India for the past nine years. The girls live with her through the year and visit their parents during holidays. "We go back for a while, but this is home too," says Divya, who's paraplegic, completed class 12 at a special school, and is planning to start her own business. Vimala set up the Nivedita Centre for Learning in 1998 as an organization that not only focused on education but on making girls financially independent. "With a little money, you can do a lot," she says. "You just have to be ready to give each person one-on-one attention." Read More >>
back to top  Saturday, January 29, 2011 Fairness Driven By Culture, Not Genes  Human behaviors are often explained as hard-wired evolutionary leftovers of life on the savannah or during the Stone Age. But a study of one very modern behavior, fairness toward total strangers one will never meet again, suggests it evolved recently, and is rooted in culture rather than biology. In a series of behavioral tests given to 2,100 people in societies around the world (from hunter-gatherers to wage laborers), an innate sense of fairness dovetailed with participation in markets and major religions. "You can't get the effects we're seeing from genes," notes evolutionary psychologist Joe Henrich. "These are things you learn as a consequence of growing up in a particular place." Read More >>
back to top Friday, January 28, 2011 Building Green Houses from Garbage  Texas home builder Dan Phillips transforms trash into artful treasures, creating intricate floor mosaics with wood scraps, kitchen counters from ivory-colored bones and roofs out of license plates. The fantastical houses which spring from his imagination cost as little as $10,000 and are made almost entirely with materials which would otherwise have ended up in a garbage dump. Read More >>
back to top Thursday, January 27, 2011 The Blanket of Laughter Cure  About two years ago, LuAnn Kessi started a group called Living Well with Cancer and Healing Through Quilting. The Harlan resident has three aunts who are cancer survivors, and all had been making things to sell to raise money for cancer research. But she felt moved to do more. "You knew that you were doing something good, but we just wanted to help in a more personal way," she said. So she decided to start a quilting class for those who have cancer. It quickly took off, already making over 100 quilts. But exhibitions aren't what it's all about. "Most of the time, we're just in love with whatever we're teaching," explains one instructor. That spills over to the students, and then the curious customers in the front store who hear the laugher. Read More >>
back to top Wednesday, January 26, 2011 Being the Change In Bihar  In an under-construction school building in India's Bihar village, children are learning algebra, chemistry, Newton's laws of motion. There's no teacher in the classroom, no blackboard. The teacher is hundreds of miles away, and he is teaching via Skype. In this very unsual school, teachers mark their attendance using a biometric fingerprinter, and students log their attendance in a computer. The school is even more unusual because Chamanpura has no electricity yet! Read More >>
back to top Tuesday, January 25, 2011 An Academic Sparks Giving to Charity  Toby Orb is a researcher at Oxford University who lives off little more than 300 pounds a month. Yet he's inspiring a movement of charity-giving that's even more impressive than Zuckerberg, Gates, and Buffett. In the past year, Ord has given more than a third of his earnings to charities working in the poorest countries. Why? For Ord, the question is: why not? "If you only have a certain amount of money then the real question is how much you can do with it... I realised that by donating a large part of my future income to the most efficient charities, I really could save thousands of people's lives." Read More >>
back to top Monday, January 24, 2011 The Best Place for a Break  In the age of multi-tasking, constant communication, and overwhelming stimuli, studies show that a 20 minute walk helps refocus our minds and revive our spirits. Researchers explain, "Nature engages your attention in relaxed fashion- leaves rustling, patterns of clouds, sunsets, a bird, the shape of an old tree. It captures our attention in subtle, bottom-up ways and allows our top-down attention abilities a chance to regenerate. Attention, therefore, is "restored" by exposure to natural environments. Read More >>
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Parents want their kids and teens to care about others - whether at school, in their community, or in need a continent away. The good news is that children "are sort of hard-wired" to want to help others, says Michael Ungar, author of "The We Generation: Raising Socially Responsible Kids." "They want to take on responsibility." From a second grade environmentalist to a 21-year-old peacemaker, here are profiles of five young people changing the world. [ 
Shopping can be exhausting, whether or not it's the holiday season. Enjoying a meal of pizza and Coke in the food court one afternoon, mall shoppers were also served an unsuspecting and generous reminder of life's spontaneous miracles. [ 
Two University of Manchester scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for their pioneering research on graphene, a one-atom-thick film of carbon whose strength, flexibility and electrical conductivity have opened up new horizons for pure physics research as well as high-tech applications. Graphene is one of the strongest, lightest and most conductive materials known to humankind. It's also 97.3 percent transparent, but looks really cool under powerful microscopes. [ 
Jim Stanicki is at a party, where he's having a great time with his family and friends. But when it's time to go, he says he has to go, and his intention is to go well. Stanicki says it is his life that is the party. After being diagnosed with bronchoalveolar cancer almost four years ago, he has shared the highs and lows of his journey with friends online through Inspire.com, a health and wellness social network. Stanicki, who describes himself as an ordinary man, has turned to helping others. "You're living burden-free, and that's a real gift if you're able to look at it in that way," he said. "I try to tell people that this can really make life delightful." [ 
When we hear the word "innovation," we often think of new technologies or silver bullet solutions - like hydrogen fuel cells or a cure for cancer. But some of the greatest advances come from taking old ideas or technologies and making them accessible to millions of people who are under-served. One off-the-grid electricity company based in Bihar is doing just that. With an innovative solution to the 1.5 billion people living without electricity, Husk Power Systems is turning rice husks into electricity that is reliable, eco-friendly, and affordable for families who can spend only $2 a month for power. [ 
During a two-week period of "self-chosen exile", Vinod Sreedhar made a radical commitment to himself: no more price tags on his work. Everything would be offered as a gift, and he would accept whatever came back his way. After the initial "noble high" of this major life decision subsided, questions rushed in. How will I make a living now? Am I setting myself up to be taken advantage of? After nearly three years of living a full-on "gift-economy" life, Vinod looks back and reflects on what motivated the decision, how he dealt with various offerings of gratitude for his work -- from little or nothing to very generous -- and one key element essential for this to work: unconditional trust. [ 
