A special guest at a Sacramento baseball game made the first pitch into a homecoming for a local soldier and his children.
Ten-year-old Deven Hereth took to the field to throw out the first pitch to a catcher wearing a mask.
That catcher was his dad, Jim Hereth, who recently returned from Afghanistan.
Jessica Kruger’s gorgeous face became the favorite in online voting for a campaign to find the new spokesperson for a perfume company.
The 21-year-old quadriplegic sees the modeling contract as an opportunity to educate the public.
She entered the “Something Sweet” campaign by the Lise Watier company upon the urging of a friend “just for fun”, but decided that the voting could help change the world’s perception of beauty.
“Jessica will make a world of difference as a role model for women seeking to triumph over tragedy through determination and perseverance,” said Kruger’s mother, Mary in a press release. “Jessica’s will to engage in helping herself persevere with rehabilitation without going into an electric chair helped her greatly to go from having no hand movement to having full use of both hands.”
Now a student at Simon Fraser University, she fell from a ladder when she was 15 and lost all use of her legs. A lifelong athlete, she went on to become the only female to play on a B.C. wheelchair rugby team.
(WATCH the inspiring video below)
Flo Meiler is 79 years old. She’s a grandmother to five, great-grandmother to two. She’s also a pole-vaulting, hurdle-jumping track and field star.
Her fitness as a senior has filled a whole chapter in the record books, with Flo setting 15 world records for women over the age of 75 in a wide range of events — from the pole vault to the discus, from the 100-meter relay to the 200-meter hurdles.
It’s no surprise that those who tend to see a rose’s blooms before its thorns are also better at handling stress. But science has never been able to reliably associate optimism with individuals’ biological stress response – until now.
New research from Concordia University’s Department of Psychology is deepening the understanding of how optimists and pessimists each handle stress by comparing them not to each other but to themselves. Results show that indeed the “stress hormone” cortisol tends to be more stable in those with more positive personalities.
Participants were asked to report on the level of stress they perceived in their day-to-day lives, and self-identify along a continuum as optimists or pessimists. Each person’s stress levels were then measured against their own average. Measuring the stress levels against participants’ own average provided a real-world picture of how individuals handle stress because individuals can become accustomed to the typical amount of stress in their lives.
Joelle Jobin, a PhD candidate in clinical psychology who co-authored the study with her supervisor Carsten Wrosch and Michael Scheier from Carnegie Mellon University, says “for some people, going to the grocery store on a Saturday morning can be very stressful, so that’s why we asked people how often they felt stressed or overwhelmed during the day and compared people to their own averages, then analyzed their responses by looking at the stress levels over many days.”
She also notes that pessimists tended to have a higher stress baseline than optimists, but also had trouble regulating their system when they go through particularly stressful situations. “On days where they experience higher than average stress, that’s when we see that the pessimists’ stress response is much elevated, and they have trouble bringing their cortisol levels back down. Optimists, by contrast, were protected in these circumstances,” says Jobin.
(Source: Concordia University) Photo credit: Helga Weber / Foter / CC
A high school student getting a perfect score on the SAT has happened before. But one East Bay student who recently did just that just graduated from middle school. It’s hard to find something 14-year-old Varun Jain can’t do.
“He is a very good human being… I want him to make a difference in the world,” his mother Vinita Jain said.
After Annette Fredskov was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and perhaps wanting to create an unbreakable bond with her own body to ward off the expected degeneration of nerve cells, she began an incredible streak of marathon running that has landed her in the media worldwide.
At 41, the Danish woman ran 26.2 miles every single day for the last year, and a double marathon on day #365. She crossed the finish line on July 14 in her hometown south of Copenhagen with friends and supporters cheering — and said she would like to keep running tomorrow, thank you very much.
American treasure hunters hit it big when they retrieved 60 tons of silver from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean this month.
Tampa, Fla.-based Odyssey Marine Exploration led the quest to find the underwater treasure, which sank in 1941 when the SS Gairsoppa — a British steamship that was secretly carrying silver from India to Great Britain to fund the war effort — was hit by a German U-boat torpedo.
(WATCH the NBC video below, or READ the full story from WSMV)
For the first time in 50 years two Persian leopard cubs have been born in a Russian national park in a major effort to reintroduce the endangered species back to the wild.
The endangered cats will be released into the wild after learning surviving skills at the Persian Leopard Breeding and Rehabilitation Centre and will start a new population of the leopards in the Caucasus Mountains.
On July 17th, Delaware became the 19th state to sign benefit corporation legislation–a move that will make a big difference for entrepreneurs who want to make money and still do good in the world.
The state’s corporation-friendly laws means it’s home to most of the country’s companies. Now those companies have the opportunity to become Certified B Corporations.
NASCAR’s top racing company, Hendrick Motorsports, gave engineer Richie Parker a shot with a 10-week internship, mostly because of his can-do attitude. Born without arms, Parker was so good at his job that he was hired and has been an integral part of the NASCAR team for more than eight years.
“It’s very demanding,” said Parker of his job at the team’s North Carolina race shop. But he wouldn’t want it any other way.
His whole life has been about finding solutions to demanding problems.
(READ the story in Autoweek)
Harbor porpoises, which had been eliminated for many decades from portions of Puget Sound, are making a big comeback.
Researchers think one of the reasons is the ongoing cleanup of industrial waste flowing into the water.
Aileen Jeffries, a research scientist with Pacific Biodiversity Institute who has pioneered the use of passive acoustic monitors for studying the porpoise, is leading a team of volunteers and biologists to learn more about the playful creatures.
A children’s hospital in Jacksonville has become the latest in the country to allow family pets to visit long-term patients who need an emotional lift.
“Although 80% of our kids are cured of cancer; it’s that last 20% that go through a lot. If the kid wants to, let them get down and play.That’s as therapeutic as many of the other things we do.”
Scientists have created an “intelligent” surgical knife that can detect in seconds whether tissue being cut is cancerous, promising more effective and accurate surgery in future.
The device, built by researchers at London’s Imperial College, could allow doctors to cut back on additional operations to remove further pieces of cancerous tumors.
(READ the full story at Reuters)
A man named Tom Morgan is making some of the most expensive and sought-after fly fishing rods in the world, which he does despite having been paralyzed from the neck down for the past 17 years. He’s revered for what he calls “thought rods,” where the instrument functions as an extension of the mind, delivering the fly where you imagine it will go, not where a series of clumsy physical muscle movements try to direct it.
Peru has initiated a new solar panel program that will provide electricity to more than 2 million of its poorest residents.
Currently, only 66% of Peru’s 24 million people has access to electricity, according to the country’s Energy and Mining Minister Jorge Merino. By 2016, the plan is to provide electricity to 95% of residents through The National Photovoltaic Household Electrification Program.
The United States and China, the world’s top emitters of greenhouse gases, agreed to five initiatives on July 10 to cut carbon output from the largest sources, including heavy duty vehicles, manufacturing and coal-fired plants, the State Department said.
The U.S.-China climate change working group, which officials from both countries formed in April, will work with companies and non-governmental groups to develop plans by October.
Atop every overpass for 500 miles Sean Misner, one of the 19 firefighters killed in Arizona, was paid a moving tribute as his wife drove by with his ashes on her way home to Santa Ynez Valley, California.
Local firefighters stood atop trucks saluting their fallen brother.
Learn more in the Reddit post, or on the Sean Misner Memorial Facebook page.
Virginia fishermen, Captain Pat Foster and Mate Adrian Colaprete, single-handedly rescued an endangered Northern Right Whale.
They caught sight of the creature 50 miles off the coast last weekend. Pat noticed the whale swimming erratically in the distance and decided to investigate. The whale was in serious danger, entangled in some sort of fishing ropes or trap line — and was slowly dragging the fishing gear behind it.
A Minnesota girl, Jaydn Moriarty, decided to make her 10th birthday party less about herself, and more about others.
Forgoing presents, she instead requested that her friends bring personal care items to donate to people who are down on their luck.
Driving home from her job as an executive at a health-care company, Lisa Fitzpatrick found her street blocked by police tape. Someone her daughter knew had been killed — the unintended victim of a drive-by shooting. For Fitzpatrick, that was the turning point.
“It was just too much,” she said. “Too many young men were lying face down in their own blood. I didn’t want it to be normal anymore. I didn’t want the children to think that this was normal. I had to do something.”
Fitzpatrick quit her job, downsized her life and created the APEX Youth Center (Always Pursuing Excellence). Since 2010, more than 460 children and youth have come for the free pizza and fun, and in the process learned conflict resolution skills.
(WATCH the video and READ the story at CNN)
