Startling progress was discovered by federal researchers in the numbers of American diabetics avoiding serious complications due to their disease over the 20 years from 1990-2010.
Heart attacks dropped by more than 60 percent, while strokes, kidney failure and amputations fell sharply.
“This is the first really credible, reliable data that demonstrates that all of the efforts at reducing risk have paid off,” said Dr. David M. Nathan, director of the Diabetes Center at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Laurie Woolever was not surprised when her six-year-old daughter asked for lots of shoes for her birthday. The little girl with red hair and blue eyes is not a fashionista. She is simply passionate about giving, and, because of that, 60 youngsters at the Children’s Home in Tampa will have new shoes as a result.
Instead of birthday gifts from friends and family last year, Savannah collected food for animals at the local Humane Society of Tampa, Florida.
Next year, she already decided, she wants toys. But she will give all of them away for children in need.
“She was always a really sweet kid, doing thing for others,” her mom, a teacher, told channel 9 news.
When her parents took her to Walmart to buy the shoes, Savannah was given a check for $250 from two of the store’s managers to buy even more shoes.
(WATCH the video from Bay News 9 – The ad that plays prior to the news story starts immediately upon clicking)
Young Somali refugees living in the world’s largest refugee camp, in Kenya, have sent letters of encouragement to Syrian refugee children who have also had to flee their homeland.
Care International, the aid agency that provides many basic services at the camp, organized the pen pal exchange and delivered the handwritten letters to Syrian children at the Refugee Assistance Centre in Amman, Jordan.
The letters, often included with hopeful drawings, offer messages of solidarity, encouragement and advice to their “dear brothers and sisters”.
The members of the Passamaquoddy tribe have already turned to the sky for help, creating a wind farm. But it’s the 60,000 acres of forest they own near the Canadian border that will be the first to deliver the tribe from poverty.
Not only do they hope to become one of the biggest maple syrup operations in Maine, they want the sweet commerce to bring hope and stability to a tribe with soaring joblessness and poverty, said Indian Township Chief Joseph Socobasin.
Airlines have tried various strategies over the years to gain passengers’ attention during the safety announcements. Delta and others have produced elaborate videos. Entertainment, though, seems to work the best.
How about a comedy stand-up routine?
A Southwest Airlines flight attendant, who delivered what sounded like a professional comedy monologue during her in-flight announcements, earned a huge round of applause from everyone on the plane.
Posted on YouTube by the hilarious Marty Cobb herself, the video has tallied more than a million views since it was posted on Saturday.
Good News Network viewers might remember the 2009 musical performance by another Southwest employee, David Holmes, who delivered his announcements while rapping.
(WATCH the video below )
April 23 UPDATE: It didn’t take long for Marty to end up on the Ellen TV Show. Digeneres was so grateful for her ability to uplift travelers’ moods that she surprised her with a big gift! WATCH it here.
Sijia became depressed in Yunnan Safari Park after a fellow panda had to be sent back to Sichuan.
To help lift her spirits, the staff members built an amusement park with parallel bars, monkey bars and a swing. They even installed a closed circuit TV so she could watch herself playing.
It seems to have helped.
Sijia’s pal came to the park for care following an earthquake.
(WATCH the video below or READ more from China’s ECNS)
Well, Drake may have just officially won himself the title of sweetest rapper ever.
He flew to Texas to surprise 15-year-old Kennedy Brown, who was forced to stop going to school because doctors discovered a brain tumor they say is terminal.
Students at her high school, Houston’s Carnegie Vanguard, matched the singer’s classiness by arranging an intimate prom dance for her — and a graduation ceremony — calling it “High School in a Day”.
To top it off they wanted to get her favorite singer to visit, so they started a Twitter campaign to get his attention. It worked.
The question might come up this month, as we celebrate the 450th anniversary of the Bard of Avon’s birth, “What’s so great about William Shakespeare anyway?
The answer is simple. Everything…
Robert Graves, writer of the superb historical novel “I, Claudius”, once said: “The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he REALLY is very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good.”
It cannot be denied that he demands some effort. As a professional linguist and life-long devotee, I assure you that it only takes a few pages when reading, or a few minutes when watching, to get used to his old-fashioned style. And then a world of unique brilliance opens.
His power over words is unequaled. Not only in the flowery Elizabethan vein, but also in simple statements.
What could be more basic than “To be or not to be”? And yet it sums up one of the greatest quandaries of human existence.
After 450 years he is still one of the most quoted authors. Where else could you find a gem like this: “Death lies on her like an untimely frost upon the sweetest flower of all the field.”
His heroes are larger than life and yet thoroughly convincing. Most of us have known what it’s like to be so insanely in love as Romeo and Juliet, we have nearly all felt Lear’s unbearable grief at the loss of a loved one. Many have experienced the madness of Othello’s jealousy or pondered the afterlife like Hamlet. If we are honest we recognize ourselves again and again, the good and the bad, the sweet and the bitter. No other writer has such breadth and depth.
Very few great writers have his power of comedy as well as tragedy. His wordplay may be a bit too clever for some, but we can still laugh at plays like a Midsummer Night’s Dream or The Taming of the Shrew (political correctness aside). Falstaff is a genuinely funny, unforgettable character.
The greatest asset, to me, is his profound and sympathetic understanding of humanity. Lady Macbeth is one of the nastiest characters in world literature. And still he manages to make her pitiful, as she tries to wash imaginary blood from her hands. Macbeth’s brooding over life is without a doubt one of the best expressions of the dark, futile sides of existence. And yet, Macbeth, for all his failings, performs admirably at the end, and dies an honorable death.
Jan Bee Landman is a prize-winning author of horror, science fiction and mainstream stories. He has published in small magazines in the USA, Canada, Belgium and the Netherlands. A collection of his short stories was published in Dutch in 1994. He was also a teacher of English for 16 years. His work can be found at www.jlandman.nl
Photo: (top) The Globe theater in London, a reproduction of the actual theater in the round where the Bard’s plays were performed, and where he, himself, was a player.
[Editor’s note: Scholars are unsure of the Bard’s actual birthday, which is traditionally celebrated April 23, but they know he was baptized on April 26.]
Glow in the dark road markings have been unveiled on a stretch of highway in the Netherlands south east of Amsterdam.
The paint contains a “photo-luminizing” powder that charges up in the daytime and slowly releases a green glow at night, doing away with the need for streetlights — and all the energy they require.
Daan Roosegaarde’s inspiration came from the undersea world, and he has been working on several ideas for sustainable roads that he calls Smart Highways.
There are no lifeguards at Ocean Beach because there shouldn’t be any swimming in that churn of frigid fast-breaking waves that can pull you under so fast that nearby beachcombers would never know it happened.
The moment surfer Tony Barbero spotted a flash of red t-shirt and a boy floundering in the icy water, he knew the kid was in big trouble.
Barbero, a 17-year-old high school student and firefighter’s son, powered through the waves, grabbed the boy and pulled him up on his surfboard.
Afterward, he saw the boy’s uncle who was already face down in the surf.
Highlands College students who are studying construction technology have used their design wizardry to fashion a luminous new dream kitchen built especially for the disabled at the Silver Bow Developmental Disabilities Council in Butte, Montana.
“There’s no other place like it in Butte,” said Cassie Weightman, specialist with the Montana Independent Living Project.
After visiting Ethiopia and seeing for himself how women and children are forced to walk miles every day for water, an Italian designer and cofounder of Architecture And Vision, became determined to create a solution that would be simple, create local jobs, and provide clean water in any of these mountainous villages.
Named WarkaWater, for the traditional warka trees which are vanishing from the landscape there, towers made of bamboo and fabric were created to harvest potable water from the evening air.
The nine-meters tall towers use special fabric hanging inside capable of collecting water through the air via condensation. The lightweight structure is designed with parametric computing, but can be built with local skills and materials by the village inhabitants.
The towers, designed by Arturo Vittori’s VittoriLab, cost approximately $550 each, and can harvest 100 liters of water per day.
Megan Ford, whose stubborn leukemia is blasted every Friday with chemotherapy, jumped at the chance to receive a song made especially for her.
The organization called “Songs of Love” called upon five middle-aged musicians who volunteer to write songs for very sick children like the young girl from Des Moines, Iowa.
The songs serve as medicine for the children but also for the aging men who create the songs. The songs, written to make the kids feel “important”, incorporate special characteristics they have revealed about their favorite hobbies, people or places.
Stanford University scientists have found a new, highly efficient way to produce liquid ethanol that doesn’t involve energy intensive food production, like corn-based fuel. This promising discovery involving carbon monoxide gas could provide an eco-friendly alternative to conventional ethanol production from crops, say the scientists.
“We have discovered the first metal catalyst that can produce appreciable amounts of ethanol from carbon monoxide at room temperature and pressure – a notoriously difficult electrochemical reaction,” said Matthew Kanan, an assistant professor of chemistry at Stanford and coauthor of the study.
Most ethanol today is produced at high-temperature fermentation facilities that chemically convert corn, sugarcane and other plants into liquid fuel. But growing crops for biofuel requires thousands of acres of land and vast quantities of fertilizer and water. In some parts of the United States, it takes more than 800 gallons of water to grow a bushel of corn, which, in turn, yields about 3 gallons of ethanol.
The new technique developed by Kanan and Stanford graduate student Christina Li requires no fermentation and, if scaled up, could help address many of the land- and water-use issues surrounding ethanol production today. “Our study demonstrates the feasibility of making ethanol by electrocatalysis,” Kanan said. “But we have a lot more work to do to make a device that is practical.”
They call the process “oxide-derived” because a novel metallic electrode was produced from copper oxide.
For the process to be carbon neutral, scientists will have to find a new way to make carbon monoxide from renewable energy instead of fossil fuel, the primary source today. Kanan envisions taking carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere to produce carbon monoxide, which, in turn, would be fed to a copper catalyst to make liquid fuel. The CO2 that is released into the atmosphere during fuel combustion would be re-used to make more carbon monoxide and more fuel – a closed-loop, emissions-free process.
Their study results are published in the April 9 advanced online edition of the journal Nature.
According to Henry David Thoreau: “Happiness is like a butterfly: the more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder.”
A large number of psychologists dare to differ. According to them if you chase the pretty butterfly named happiness enough you might just get it to come and hop on your shoulder. Here are eight simple — and some of them, essential – steps to happiness:
1. Stop dwelling.
The past is precious because you can learn from your mistakes and learn from others’ mistakes.
The pain is just training; it doesn’t define you. Think about what went wrong but stop dwelling on it. Decide how you will make sure that, next time, it won’t happen again.
Choose to remember the good times. Choose to forget the pain and the tears. Only then can the heartaches heal.
Instead of buying that extravagant piece of diamond, why not go on a trip to a place that has always intrigued you?
No doubt buying things makes us feel better immediately, but at the end of the day it’s the experiences that count. They enrich our lives and make memories that remain for years.
3. Pay compliments.
Start paying compliments. If you like someone’s hairdo or their shoes or their smile, go ahead, tell them. Tell them you find them beautiful, with a smile. And the moment you do that, you will feel better about yourself. The idea behind this is when you know you can make someone feel better about themselves, you automatically feel good about yourself too.
Studies show this works.
4. Stop blaming, Foster forgiveness.
When you blame others for a mistake they did, you, yourself, carry half the burden of their faults on your shoulders.
If the loss is too great, forgiveness will take time. Know that holding onto grudges will only increase your pain.
5. Start a gratitude journal.
Maintain a gratitude diary. Write down all the things you are grateful for.
You saw a baby and she smiled at you at the coffee shop. It made you feel so good; write it down in your diary.
Doing this exercise can calm despair and promote happiness.
Senior surfer Harold Ige, by Sun Star
6. Do what you like. Live your dreams.
This is a very simple and easy thing to do, but we rarely we do it.
Do you like reading? Sit all day at home and read those books you love.
Do you like dancing but due to something or the other you never got a chance to take your dancing onto another level?
I say, do it right now. Go get yourself enrolled into a dance school or dance at parties for fun. Go and try your luck in a reality show. Do it! Curbing our desires for the sake of fitting in the society or under any other pressure is no good. Do what you really want to.
7. Learn something new.
Think of a subject, a country or a flower that you wish you knew more about and spend 20 minutes on the Internet reading about it. Or, if you prefer, go to a bookstore and buy a book on the subject. Pick a subject that is really close to your heart, not something that you think you ‘should’ know or ‘need to’ learn about.
8. Smile!
Indeed the simplest step to happiness.
Even if you don’t feel like it, fake it! Research shows that even a fake smile induces hormones that make you feel better instantly.
Learn to take these simple little conscious steps towards happiness and it will do wonders to your life.
Photo credit (top): Naveen Kadam Photography – CC license
The Dunkin’ Donuts, Baskin-Robbins Community Foundation just gave $1,000,000 to help put food in backpacks for poor children to take home from school throughout America.
The grant will support the Feeding America® initiative that provides hungry children with nutritious and easy-to-prepare food to take home on weekends and school vacations when other resources are not available. The grant will also support the School Pantry Program, which provides food to children and their families to take home from school.
The grant, announced on March 25 on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, is the largest donation in The Foundation’s history, and will be distributed among Feeding America member food banks across the United States.
The Dunkin’ Donuts, Baskin-Robbins Community Foundation has partnered with Feeding America at the national level since 2007 and has donated more than $1,000,000 over the last seven years to support Feeding America and its local food banks. Additionally, over the past seven years, the DDBRCF has addressed the issue of hunger relief through both national and local efforts. Dunkin’ Donuts and Baskin-Robbins franchisees have led food drives in the communities they serve and have organized volunteer days at their local food banks to help fill backpacks with nutritious meals for children.
Feeding America is the nation’s leading domestic hunger-relief charity, with more than 200 member food banks serving all 50 states distributing 3 billion pounds of donated food and grocery products annually.
“With millions of children struggling everyday in America, the support of our partners in the fight against hunger has never been more critical,” said Maura Daly, Chief Communication and Development Officer at Feeding America. “We are extremely grateful to The Dunkin’ Donuts & Baskin-Robbins Community Foundation for their generous grant to help us distribute food to those who need it the most.”
A pioneering European Union survey into the impact of pests and diseases on honey bees in 2012 and 2013 found death rates were lower than feared, in part countering concerns about the collapse of colonies of the crop-pollinating insects.
“It’s the first major study of pests and diseases that affect honey bees. A lot of it seems very encouraging,” said a bee specialist in response to the study of 32,000 bee colonies across 17 EU member states.
A rising number of Australian teenagers are choosing not to drink alcohol, according to the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre.
Between 2001 and 2010 the number of teens aged 14 to 17 abstaining from alcohol rose from 33 percent to more than 50 percent, the research shows.
“There’s also a sense that the current generation is very focused on health and well-being and this is one step they’re taking to try and stay fitter and healthier, said the study’s author Dr Michael Livingston.
Startling progress was discovered by federal researchers in the numbers of American diabetics avoiding serious complications due to their disease over the 20 years from 1990-2010.
