This pair of 7-year-olds, Kollin Cox and Ryan Branson, are best friends. When one of them lost everything in a fire, the other one asked his mother to help him make a video and post it on Facebook.
Since then, the St. Louis television stations have run news stories about the friendship that helped raise $11,000 to replace toys, beds and clothes for the young boy and his mother Sonya, proving that the destructive blaze was no match for this pair of elementary school BFFs.
(WATCH the video below from Nightly News or READ the story from KTVI-TV) – Photo via GoFundMe page
SHARE the story with links below…Story tip from carilyn
A start-up plans to help solve the world’s climate problems by using drones to plant forests of seedlings.
“We are going to counter industrial scale deforestation using industrial scale reforestation,” says Lauren Fletcher, the founder of BioCarbon Engineering.
The environmental engineer who worked 20 years with NASA wants to use drone technology to plant up to one billion trees a year, without having to plant each one by hand.
Drones will fly two or three meters above the ground and fire out pods containing pre-germinated seeds that are covered in a nutritious hydrogel.
The company’s CEO, who might be called ‘Johnny Apple Drone’, thinks it should be possible to plant up to 36,000 trees a day, and at around 15% of the cost of traditional methods. And they aren’t just looking to create plantations of trees, but full ecosystems.
“Together with tree seeds, we hope to seed in other species including micro-organisms and fungi to improve the soil quality and ensure long-term sustainability of our efforts.”
Gaurang Damani was so tired of the dirt and stench in a Mumbai train station that he regularly wrote letters to the Central Railway to complain. Finally, the company offered the option to Damani and his non-profit organization to adopt the station and clean it up themselves.
The NGO, Karmayogi Pratisthan, gathered nearby residents and volunteers from colleges, elementary schools, garden and sport clubs to transform King’s Circle station. Beginning in late December, the beautification took 4 months.
Now, the walls of the station have been brightly painted with social messages and inspiring murals, countless bags of trash rotting on the premises were replaced with trash bins, walkways and floors were scrubbed, and even flowers and trees were planted.
Women and students who loathed getting on and off at the station now can use it comfortably. New street lamps now make it safer at night and the foul smell has gone away. Sweepers take turns regularly maintaining the appearance and new signage encourages cleanliness.
“The decrease in littering and spitting means that I have made a difference,” Damani told Mid-Day news. “I have invested my own money and there is also money coming through donations. The fact that my NGO has adopted the station (means) people are helping to keep the station clean as well as to beautify it.”
After eleven days of being inexplicably paralyzed from the waist down, a sudden recovery brought Bailey Murrill back on her feet again. The video below shows Bailey surprising her favorite nurse with the miracle.
Bailey rolls down the hallway in a wheelchair toward the nurse, pretending still to be immobile. The nurse reaches out for a hug when all of a sudden, Bailey stands up to meet her embrace.
“Yes!” screams the nurse. “Thank you Lord, yes!”
And Bailey’s mother recorded the whole thing for us to see…
A lot of fancy threads get left behind at the dry cleaners, but they were put to good use this week, after a group of Korean-American dry cleaners donated 2,000 pieces of unclaimed clothing to New York City’s most needy.
80 boxes of coats, suits, shirts and pants were collected by the Korean Dry Cleaners Association of New York. They spent six months gathering the items from launderers across the city as part of their “Clothes of Love” program.
It has become an annual tradition for the group, which has, over the past 30 years, donate tens of thousands of clothing items to homeless shelters across the city through New York’s Department of Homeless Services.
A study of 96,000 children shows that the chances of a child developing autism is the same whether they receive the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine or not.
The study looked at insurance claims for children born between 2001 and 2007. It found 0.7% of unvaccinated children developed Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) while 0.5% of children who were vaccinated did. Dr. Bryan King, program director of the Autism Center at Seattle Children’s Hospital, said the numbers show “the risk of ASD recurrence in families does not differ between vaccinated and unvaccinated children.”
A 1998 study published in the journal Lancet that linked autism to the vaccine has been debunked and withdrawn by the publication. Every study since has shown no link between the two.
The latest study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, and funded by The National institute of Mental Health, looked specifically at a high risk group of children — those who had an older sibling with autism — and still found no link between ASD and the MMR vaccine.
“These findings indicate no harmful association between MMR vaccine receipt and ASD even among children already at higher risk for ASD,” the researchers wrote in their paper.
Happy Birthday wishes, and a collective Mazel Tov, to Barbra Streisand, who turns 73 on Friday.
The rare EGOT winner – someone who has won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony – began her week donning a beret at the “Women In The World” summit where she spoke about the importance of being valued.
Known as an “unconventional” beauty who refused to alter her image for Hollywood, Babs is a hero to many fans. But she simply calls herself an “actress who sings.”
Born Barbara Joan Streisand in Brooklyn in 1942, she got her big break at age 20 in the Broadway show, I Can Get It For You Wholesale, before staring on stage– and screen– in Funny Girl. She is best known as a mega-selling vocalist and for other roles inA Star Is Born and The Way We Were. With the release of Yentl in 1983, Streisand established herself as one of the film industry’s most notable figures by becoming the first woman to write, produce, direct and act in a major film.
Streisand posted on Facebook today that she was taken to a pre-birthday dinner by husband James Brolin and friends where she enjoyed all her “childhood comfort foods” at the Ralph Lauren Polo Bar in New York.
SHARE the Birthday Wishes Below / Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Want another reason to love his Royal Highness the young red-haired Prince of Wales?
Prince Harry unleashed some laughs last week playing a game of wheelchair Australian football with wounded members of the Soldier Recovery Center during his month-long tour with the Australian Army. During his stay, Prince Harry, or Captain Harry Wales, as he’s known in the British Army, worked and lived among the soldiers of the 1st Brigade and other units, but is now headed for retirement, finishing his last tour ‘down under’.
Committed to charitable causes, particularly injured service members, Prince Harry spearheaded the Invictus Games last year, a sporting tournament for wounded veterans from 13 nations. He also is involved in AIDS charities and research, much like his late mother, Princess Diana.
He is fourth in line for the throne, but Prince Harry is first in the hearts of his fellow Afghan veterans.
(WATCH the wheelchair football videos below)
Photo by: CPL Oliver Carter, Australian Defense Force via Facebook
The class of 2015 can look forward to more money in their first paychecks and more job openings than last year’s graduates saw. Multiple surveys paint a better picture for this year’s crop of graduates in terms of both starting pay and demand for workers.
At least 26% of employers in a CareerBuilder survey say they will pay new college grads at least $50,000 their first year out of school. Engineering and computer science degrees lead the pack with each expected to draw a starting salary above $60,000 in a survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE). The survey indicates that a graduate with a bachelors degree in petroleum engineering will earn the most straight out of school — $80,600 on average.
That kind of demand is showing up in other disciplines as more recruiters show up on college campuses around the country this spring.
”I’m seeing a lot more competition,” Dan Black, EY’s U.S. recruiting leader, told the AP. EY (the accounting giant formerly known as Ernst & Young) plans to hire 9,000 college graduates this year.
Overall, companies are expected to increase their hiring of college grads by 16% this year over last year based on a survey last fall by Michigan State University’s Collegiate Employment Research Institute, according to AP.
“Even arts and humanities are making a comeback,” Institute Director Philip Gardner told AP.
And even though humanities degrees are at the lowest end of the average pay scale in the NACE survey, the average starting pay for a graduate is still $45,042 a year — $2,000 more than the average compensation for all workers in the U.S. just two years ago.
When a man rolled off the platform and onto the train tracks yesterday around 1:00pm, one man jumped right in after him, and another soon followed.
When the man, who was believed to have fallen asleep in his motorized wheelchair, went onto the tracks, many people ran over to look, but only one, Dr. David Silverberg, jumped in after him.
“I just kind of took a quick look to see if the train was coming. I’ve got a nine-year-old so I didn’t want to get killed and leave her without a father,” Dr. Silverberg told the CBC.
When he called out to another man for help, that man jumped down right away.
Between the two of them, they were able to hoist him and his wheelchair out, and then get themselves “the heck off.”
Dr. Silverberg said he was just “doing what he had to do.”
We disagree—in this situation, nobody ever really knows what to do as the seconds tick by.
In a match made in dog heaven, a toddler without feet gets a new puppy who is missing a paw.
Sapphyre Johnson, a three-year-old who lost her feet at age one, was given the gift of a cuddly nine-week-old German shephard named Lieutenant Dan. The canine, named after the amputee soldier in the movie Forrest Gump, was brought to her on Monday by devoted breeder Karen Riddle of Greenville, South Carolina.
After other breeders suggested the dog be euthanized, Riddle made it her personal mission to search for a special needs child or a wounded veteran to place him with.
She knew in her heart that the doggy deserved an owner with whom he could share a unique bond, and Shriner’s Hospitals For Children helped her find the perfect match.
“A lot of kids don’t see other children or animals that have issues like they have,” the little girl’s father Matthew Johnson told The Greenville News.
Shriners’s specialist Elaine Hardin said that Sapphyre fell in love with the dog right away just based on his picture.
“The first time I showed her a picture of the dog, she looked at it for a moment, and she said, ‘That’s my puppy. He’s just like me,’” Hardin said.
As an added plus, the hospital has offered to make a prosthetic foot for Lieutenant Dan when he’s large enough, the same way that they made two for Sapphyre.
The two youngsters are currently cavorting in Tennessee enjoying their perfect match.
(WATCH the short video, or READ the story from the Greenville News)
Just like that, a $360,000 burden was lifted from Tim Ward’s shoulders following a year of tragedy.
When Ward lost both his wife and his house during a mudslide near Oso, Washington last year, his only comfort was a reunion with his faithful dog, Blue, who lost a leg after being trapped for three days under a tree.
Last week, things got a bit more comfortable after an anonymous donor sealed a deal to pay off of his entire mortgage. Ward was working with Chase’s “special-cases unit” to negotiate a settlement of his loan when the mysterious benefactor swooped in to help.
“He said, ‘How much is the mortgage?’ and said he wanted to pay it off,” said Darcy Donohoe-Wilmot, a spokesperson for Chase Bank, where the donor does business.
Now, Ward is free to focus on his grief-support meetings, and training Blue to be a service dog, after it was noticed that the pup was a huge help to others in the group.
You’ve got to spend money to make money and a generous CEO is making a lot more money a week after he invested in his employees. The company, Gravity Payments, has been flooded with new business since CEO Dan Price announced he’d raise every one of his employee’s pay to $70,000 a year — and slashed his own annual pay from $1 million to the same $70,000.
“I’m actually shocked by the reaction from businesses,” Price told CNN Money. “It has me on cloud nine.”
Price says the credit card transaction processing company he founded has recorded the best week for acquiring new clients in the 11 years since he founded it. He says dozens of new clients have signed on with the company and he’s thinking about expanding his staff to 120 people.
Good News Network reported last week Price announced he was raising the pay of 70 of his workers after reading a study on how having extra money made a difference in the lives of people earning under $70,000 a year. The raise doubled the salaries of 30 workers.
And more people want to work for his company. Gravity Payments received 3,500 job applications in the past week for two open positions — roughly five times what they usually get for an opening.
It was a foggy night with low visibility when Mendocino County Sheriff Deputies came across an unexpected highway wanderer at 1:00am Sunday.
The lost sea lion pup had walked a quarter-mile from the ocean near Fort Bragg, California, so was happy to see a couple friendly faces.
Deputies contacted the Marine Mammal Center after discovering an orange tag attached to the 20lb pup’s front flipper. The staff said they had previously rehabilitated the animal and he had become quite used to people. This was no shock to the deputies, since the little fella had been vying for their affection.
Is old-fashioned storytelling and merriment a thing of the past?
Nay! The fantasy lives, and it’s eco-friendly.
Inspired by the writings of J.R.R. Tolkein, ancient mythology and Victorian romanticism, The Travelers of Elsewhere circus troupe will be enchanting Scottish audiences this summer by performing in forests across the country–and sleeping under the stars while they do it.
The small group will travel to local woodlands in a horse drawn carriage to perform in green spaces within walking distance of towns. Promoting love of the environment and sustainable lifestyles, the caravan will entertain with a mix of interactive theater, improvisation and storytelling in the midst of their encampment.
Their juggling and puppet shows prove that entertainment doesn’t have to involve a whole bunch of Hollywood technology. But they do need horses and a second cart, so they are crowd-funding their tour.
Kenn Musso, the Director and Cofounder of Elsewhere Events believes that a more sustainable society will be better equipped to find creative solutions for problems, and hopes to inspire children to look toward nature for solutions and fun.
If you’re able to catch the performance, please let us know if the Hobbit drives a Prius.
(WATCH their enchanting video below) – Story tip from Antti Jalkanen
An apple a day may keep the doctor away but two cups of coffee could keep breast cancer from coming back. Swedish researchers found that two chemicals in your morning joe react with the cancer drug tamoxifen that prevents a recurrence of breast cancer or lessened tumor growth in women treated for the disease.
“The study shows that among the over 500 women treated with tamoxifen, those who had drunk at least two cups of coffee a day had only half the risk of recurrence of those who drank less coffee or none at all,” said Ann Rosendahl, one of the researchers who conducted the study at Lund University in Sweden.
Researchers found that caffeine and caffeic acid in coffee reduced cell division and increased cancer cell death — but the effect was even stronger if women were taking tamoxifen, an effective drug that is widely given to recovering patients. The combination effectively erases the road map for spreading cancer cells, stopping the tumors in their tracks.
“This shows that these substances have an effect on the breast cancer cells and turn off signaling pathways that the cancer cells require to grow,” Rosendahl and study co-author Helena Jernström said in a statement from Lund University.
Good News Network reported four years ago about a study linking coffee to reduced risk of prostate cancer. Since then, several studies, including one in 2013 by the same Swedish research team, have found a link between coffee and reduced cancer risks, But this is the first to identify chemicals in coffee that protect against a breast cancer recurrence. This latest study was published in the journal Clinical Cancer Research.
“Just two cups a day is sufficient to make a difference,” the researchers said in a statement.
When Jacob Hall was late on a tooth-fairy payment for his seven-year-old son Evan, he thought on his feet, as many parents do, explaining that the tooth fairy lives in Australia, and has to travel from down under.
When his son lost his next tooth, Hall posted on Reddit with an unusual request.
“My son thinks his tooth fairy is Australian. Help a dad out?” wrote Jacob. “He writes letters to the tooth fairy when he loses a tooth, and he would be blown away by an audio reply.”
Another father of three, Jeff Pyrotek, a stay at home dad, decided to step in to help from his desktop in Victoria.
It took Jeff about thirty seconds to record a greeting from a tooth fairy named Bruce, explaining, “I had the equipment sitting in front of me and it wasn’t going to be much effort.”
He recorded the greeting and added a plug, “Don’t forget to brush your teeth.”
Since then, Hall says Evan “hasn’t been able to stop talking about it.”
That’s a real beaut.
(LISTEN to the recording above, or READ the story, w/ photo, from ABC.au) – File photo by OpenThreads, CC
There is more along Route 66 than just strip malls and chain restaurants. It turns out, there are actually more museums in the United States–a lot more–than there are places to order a Non-fat Mocha or Big Mac.
From the largest cities to most rural towns, you can find 35,000 museums scattered across America, while Starbucks has only 11,000 locations, and McDonald’s just 14,000.
Los Angeles has the most, with 681, followed by New York (with 414). Chicago, Washington, DC and San Diego round out the top five.
In small towns and rural counties that might be too small to attract a Starbucks or McDonald’s, you are likely to find museums set up by local historic societies. For instance, Storey County, Nevada, with fewer than 4,000 people, has 11 different options–including the Firemen’s Museum, Radio Museum, the Way It Was Museum, and even a Gambling Museum.
An experimental Ebola drug shows promise for fighting the disease after it cured monkeys that were already sick with fever from the virus. The three animals received the drug and showed no signs of the disease after 28 days.
So far, there is no working vaccine or cure for the virus, but after the promising results with monkeys, human trials are planned for later this year.
“This is the first study to show post-exposure protection… against the new Makona outbreak strain of Ebola-Zaire virus,” said University of Texas scientist Thomas Geisbert, who was the senior author of the study published in the journal Nature.
The drug, called TKM-Ebola-Guinea, works by blocking genes to keep the disease from reproducing and spreading through the body. It targets three genes of Ebola responsible for replication using something called siRNA — or “small interfering RNA.” It does exactly what its name suggests, latching onto the viral strand of Ebola, and slicing it into harmless pieces unable to reproduce the virus.
The drug specifically targets the Makona strain of the virus responsible for the recent outbreak in West Africa, but its manufacturer, Tekmira Pharmaceuticals, says the drug can be adapted for any strain of Ebola and can be manufactured in as little as eight weeks.
This, along with a drug made from tobacco plants called ZMapp and another drug named brincidofovir, which are also going through tests, show promise of better treatments for the disease. Further, several vaccines are currently being tested in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone to actually prevent the disease.
(WATCH an animation below or READmore from BBC) – Photo courtesy of TKM
When Michigan mom Jessica Lindsay saw two police officers approaching her children last week, she began to worry. What was going on?
The concern soon gave way to delight as she realized the officers, who had been responding to a call in their Muskegon neighborhood, just wanted to get in on the kids’ football game.
“We first started to play catch right here in the yard,” Jessica’s son, Marquan, explained. “Then he (the officer) said, ‘You guys want to play a game?’”
Her oldest son asked his mom to record it, so she got her phone and later posted it on Facebook. With more than 700,000 views, the clip itself has been a touchdown.
Lindsay said “it’s awesome” that there are still good officers out there, ones that would take time from their busy schedules to interact with the community’s children. “We need that more often,” she told WOOD-TV 8.
(WATCH interviews from WOOD-TV or SEE the mom’s video below)
Come outside and this is wht I seen...two Muskegon police officer was plyn football wit the kids.
