This makes me giddy…. The Atlantic shared this Twitter exchange between Star Trek legend, William Shatner, and a Canadian astronaut who is currently serving aboard the International Space Station.
On January 3, Shatner sent a tweet to Chris Hadfield, whose Twitter handle is @Cmdr_Hadfield:
@Cmdr_Hadfield Are you Tweeting from Space?
Tony Tolbert, a Harvard-educated lawyer in Los Angeles, decided to move into his mother’s home so he could offer his own fully-furnished house to a homeless family of five, and give it to them rent-free for a year.
Felicia Duke had been sharing a single room at a shelter with three of her children. But it was for kids only and her older son couldn’t join them. So not only was the family homeless and broke, but separated.
“Kindness creates kindness. Generosity creates generosity. Love creates love,” Tolbert said. “And I think if we can share some of that and have more stories about people doing nice things for other people, and fewer stories about people doing horrible things to other people, that’s a better world.”
(WATCH the video below or READ the story from CBS)
Tony Tolbert, a Harvard-educated lawyer in Los Angeles, decided to move into his mother’s home so he could offer his own fully-furnished house to a homeless family of five, and give it to them rent-free for a year.
Felicia Duke had been sharing a single room at a shelter with three of her children. But it was for kids only and her older son couldn’t join them. So not only was the family homeless and broke, but separated.
On January 3, 2013, a record number of women were sworn in as members of the 113th U.S. Congress. 80 new congresswomen joined a total of 20 female senators to produce a record number serving in both chambers.
A 12 year-old became the center of international attention early in the Iraq war when television pictures showed him crying in a hospital after suffering severe burns during a botched US bombing raid in 2003 that destroyed his home and entire family.
Ali Abbas, now 21, lost both his arms and suffered serious burns. But today, since being fitted with artificial arms in a British Hospital, he lives in prosperous south-west London, is attempting to set up a charity for limbless children, and has married a childhood friend.
(READ the story, w/ photos, from the Telegraph)
The US wind industry is powering up once again after Congress extended a critical tax credit that wind companies say will save tens of thousands of domestic jobs and allow more clean energy projects to ramp up in 2013.
The extension and several other clean energy tax breaks came out of a Senate Finance Committee and was included in the deal to avert the ‘fiscal cliff’.
(READ the story from Reuters)
Three times a week, Robbie Norris, a lean, 50-year-old yoga teacher, hops into his 1992 Volvo and heads to his class in Richmond, Va. past barbed wire and armed guards to a windowless room where a dozen women, scarred and tattooed, are waiting on donated yoga mats.
When many states have cut their wellness and education programs for inmates, citing cost and political pressure, some wardens are looking for a low-cost, low-risk way for inmates to reflect on their crimes, improve their fitness and cope with the stress of overcrowded prison life are turning toward yoga.
Do you have a serious food allergy and want to know if there’s any culprits in your cookie? Now there’s an app for that.
It will take you 20 minutes to get the answer using a new application developed by UCLA researchers for your smartphone.
The app comes with a device, called the iTube — like a test tube — which allows your phone to scan and test a food item before you eat it.
So far, the lightweight device, which attaches to your cell phone, can detect traces of peanuts, almonds, eggs, gluten and hazelnuts with the same high level of sensitivity found in a professional laboratory.
Do you have a serious food allergy and want to know if there’s any culprits in your cookie? Now there’s an app for that.
It will take you 20 minutes to get the answer using a new application developed by UCLA researchers for your smartphone.
The app comes with a device, called the iTube — like a test tube — which allows your phone to scan and test a food item before you eat it.
So far, the lightweight device, which attaches to your cell phone, can detect traces of peanuts, almonds, eggs, gluten and hazelnuts with the same high level of sensitivity found in a professional laboratory.
Food allergies affect as many as 8 percent of young children and can trigger severe and even life-threatening reactions. And while consumer-protection laws regulate the labeling of ingredients in pre-packaged foods, cross-contaminations can still occur during processing, manufacturing and transportation.
Although several products that detect allergens in foods are currently available, they are complex and require bulky equipment, making them ill-suited for use in public settings, according to the UCLA researchers.
The iTube weighs less than two ounces, and uses the cell phone’s built-in camera, along with an application to run a test that analyzes allergen-concentration in a test tube.
To test for allergens, food samples are initially ground up and mixed in a test tube with hot water and an extraction solvent; this mixture is allowed to set for several minutes. Then, following a step-by-step procedure, the prepared sample is mixed with a series of other reactive testing liquids. The entire preparation takes roughly 20 minutes. When the sample is ready, it is measured optically with the camera in your phone.
Beyond just a “yes” or “no” answer as to whether allergens are present, the test can also quantify how much of an allergen is in a sample, in parts per million.
The UCLA team’s research was recently published online in the peer-reviewed journal Lab on a Chip and will be featured in a forthcoming print issue of the journal.
“We envision that this cell phone–based allergen testing platform could be very valuable, especially for parents, as well as for schools, restaurants and other public settings,” said Aydogan Ozcan, leader of the research team and a UCLA associate professor of electrical engineering and bioengineering. “Once successfully deployed in these settings, the big amount of data — as a function of both location and time — that this platform will continuously generate would indeed be priceless for consumers, food manufacturers, policymakers and researchers, among others.”
Allergen-testing results of various food products, tagged with a time and location stamp, can be uploaded directly from cell phones to iTube servers to create a personalized testing archive, which could provide additional resources for allergic individuals around the world. A statistical allergy database, coupled with geographic information, could be useful for future food-related policies — for example in restaurants, food production and for consumer protection, the researchers said.
iTube could be available commercially in about 18 months, Ozcan told a writer at the LA Weekly, who quipped, “Now if only they could come up with an EpiPen app.” No word yet on what the device would cost.
It’s more than just a hobby. Working on cars and motorcycles, Read said, fills the aching void in his life left when his war wounds stripped him of the ability to be a combat Marine.
“My hands are meant to be dirty,” he said.
Next month, he’ll travel to Peru to be a ride-along mechanic for a team of wounded U.S. and British military personnel during the 6,000-mile Dakar Rally. The team is sponsored by an organization called Race2Recovery, supported by the royal family.
Kam Gottlieb of Wilmette, Illinois was inspired by photographs of charity work a friend’s mom did in Haiti so she decided to do some good work of her own.
She loves animals but didn’t want to simply walk dogs at the local shelter, especially because of the winter temperatures near Chicago. But she was concerned about the animals getting enough exercise. Her mother mentioned the rising popularity of dog treadmills. She instantly knew it could be her passion to raise money to buy treadmills for the pups stuck in shelters.
Georgia transportation officials are planning to add a half-dozen bear tunnels beneath a highway in what will be a first-of-its-kind project for the state.
A project manager for the Georgia Department of Transportation says preliminary plans have already been completed and the state is now buying land along State Route 96, according to the AP report from WSPA.
Similar engineering efforts have helped other animals cross roads, including endangered panthers in Florida for whom tunnels were built. The passageway under the highway that bisects the 18,000-acre Paynes Prairie wetland in Gainesville has been a huge success at reducing roadkill.
The GravityLight gets power from the slow lowering of a weight. All it takes is enough elbow grease to hoist the bag, and you can light a room with nothing but a bag of sand.
The need is enormous: more than 1 billion people still lack electricity.
Two socialpreneurs wanted to find a replacement for the dangerous and dirty kerosene lamp–which is also relatively expensive to run, highly polluting, and comes with multiple health and fire risks.
The GravityLight gets power from the slow lowering of a weight. All it takes is enough elbow grease to hoist the bag, and you can light a room with nothing but a bag of sand.
The need is enormous: more than 1 billion people still lack electricity.
Two socialpreneurs wanted to find a replacement for the dangerous and dirty kerosene lamp–which is also relatively expensive to run, highly polluting, and comes with multiple health and fire risks.
A priceless one-of-a-kind electric guitar belonging to Michael Jackson’s touring guitar player, Jennifer Batten, was stolen from her car outside a restaurant on Saturday night.
The guitar, decorated with an image of Masai tribesmen, was made especially for her and was covered with autographs of her fellow guitar players, including Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page.
The good news followed a few days later when a pair of alert neighbors found the instrument and wanted to return it.
Douglas Benedetti installs snow chains on people’s cars, but the man he stopped to help alongside snowy I-80 in California one night last week was searching for a wedding ring that had slipped off his finger in the cold.
Benedetti went on his way, and the man gave up looking. But Benedetti returned later that night with a headlamp and flashlight and a determination to be the man’s last hope.
Now he needs to find the man, because he found the ring.
2012 will go into the record books as the safest year ever for airline travelers worldwide.
3 billion passengers flew in 2012 on more than 93,000 commercial flights each day, and yet not a single fatality was recorded in the United States in more than four years.
Globally, just one accident was recorded this year for every 5.4 million flights — an improvement of over 50% from last year.
2012 will go into the record books as the safest year ever for airline travelers worldwide.
3 billion passengers flew in 2012 on more than 93,000 commercial flights each day, and yet not a single fatality was recorded in the United States in more than four years.
Globally, just one accident was recorded this year for every 5.4 million flights — an improvement of over 50% from last year.
U.S. stocks closed out 2012 with their strongest day in more than a month. Not only that, the S&P 500 ended the year up 13.4 percent since January 1 of last year, its best performance since 2009. The Dow Jones average added 7.3% for the year and the Nasdaq jumped 16%.
Many traders were optimistic that the government would reach a deal on “fiscal cliff” matters this week.
Lavish fireworks displays ushered in 2013 across the world.
Huge fireworks lit up skylines in Sydney, Hong Kong and Shanghai, and even the once-isolated country of Myanmar joined the countdown party for the first time in decades.
“We believe that we can change the life around us and become better ourselves,” President Vladimir Putin told the nation in a New Year’s Eve address. “We can become more heedful, compassionate, gracious.”
