Muscular dystrophy robbed Nick Torrance of his ability to walk, which would be hard enough for a teenager to handle. But it also hindered his everyday capabilities such as opening his locker at school.
Fortunately, Nick’s high school classmates were clever enough to create a solution as a homework assignment.
Two Pinckney Community High School seniors used their robotics ingenuity and created an electronic automatic locker opener.
LeBron James said he always knew if he became an NBA professional, at some point in his life he would make sure the antiquated gymnasium at St. Vincent-St. Mary High School was renovated.
Now a top star in the sport, he has donated $1 million to build a state-of-the-art gym for his alma mater to be completed this fall.
LeBron graduated from STVM in 2003 after spending four memorable years playing basketball and winning three State Championships for the Akron area school under the leadership of Coach Dru.
A Dutch artist is cheering people in Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbor with a yellow 50-foot-tall rubber duck.
The motto of the Rubber Duck Project is ‘Spreading Joy Around the World’.
And indeed it has done that brilliantly.
Since 2008, Florentijn Hofman’s giant floating toy has glided its way into San Paolo, Auckland, Sydney, Amsterdam and Osaka.
Cooler temperatures helped firefighters battling a wildfire in southern California on Sunday and an official said the blaze was expected to be fully under control within 24 hours.
The blaze had been spreading rapidly due to the region’s high heat and Santa Anna winds since it started on Thursday in a coastal area northwest of Los Angeles.
In one of nature’s best comeback stories, endangered green sea turtles have multiplied in Florida during the past two decades and are now thriving in protected waters.
Intense conservation efforts have helped these 300-pound vegetarians flourish, with females laying hundreds of eggs along Florida’s east and southwest coasts and returning every two or three years to the exact same spot to nest again.
Instead of reaching for cookies or cake when stressed out, you might want some dark chocolate instead. New research from Australia has found that the polyphenols in dark chocolate increase calmness and contentedness.
Polyphenols are found naturally in plants and are a basic component of the human diet. These compounds have been shown to reduce oxidative stress which is associated with many diseases. They may also have beneficial psychological effects.
“Anecdotally, chocolate is often linked to mood enhancement,” said Matthew Pase of Swinburne University of Technology, the lead author of the study.
“This clinical trial is perhaps the first to scientifically demonstrate the positive effects of cocoa polyphenols on mood.”
Participants drank their assigned drink once a day for 30 days. After 30 days, those who drank the high dose concentration of cocoa polyphenols reported greater calmness and contentedness than those who drank either of the other drink mixes.
Only those who consumed the highest amount of polyphenols (500 mg per day) reported the positive effects.
The research is published in the May 2013 issue of the Journal of Psychopharmacology.
An 8-year-old girl with brain cancer found herself surrounded by a flashmob of love yesterday and it’s all thanks to a man who lost his daughter to the disease.
His name is “Tattoo Tom” Mitchell and he became Tara Sankner’s Prince Charming for a day, directing almost a thousand people to come line the streets and chant the name of their Princess Tara.
College students at Rice University who were challenged to design solutions for doctors working in impoverished global communities have won a $100,000 award from MIT for innovation.
The two professors who started the student program hung around clinics in the developing world looking to identify which problems needed solving.
The ingenious but simple prize-winning gadget guards against giving an improper dosage of drugs administered via syringe.
Amid an expanse of undulating Iowa farmland and Catholic and Lutheran churches, the town of Elkader bears the name of a Muslim hero.
Abd el-Kader was renowned in the 19th century for leading Algeria’s fight for independence and protecting non-Muslims from persecution. Even Abraham Lincoln extolled him.
This weekend, for the fifth year in a row, Elkader will welcome a delegation of Arab dignitaries to celebrate this rare lifeline of tolerance, spanning continents and centuries, reports the New York Times.
Using 3D printers to create biological structures has become widespread.
Printing electronics has made similar advances, particularly for low-cost, low-power disposable items. The first successful combination of these two technologies has recently been reported by a group of researchers at Princeton.
A next-generation material first earmarked for use in electronics has proven itself a capable clean-up agent for polluted waters.
Boron nitride, or “white graphene”, can soak up organic pollutants such as industrial chemicals or engine oil in incredible amounts for their size, according to a report in Nature Communications.
Ehab Sadeek, an Egyptian Muslim who owns a bagel store in Winchester, Mass., called the marathon bombers “cowards who don’t represent my faith or religion.”
The all-natural bakery owner, who has run the Bagel Land wholesale business for 17 years, says he will give 100-percent of his profits to the One Fund Boston. And, he will continue to do so until the last victim is out of the hospital.
The economy added 165,000 jobs in April, surprising economists and easing fears of an imminent collapse in the recovery.
The Labor Department had previously reported a disappointing 88,000 jobs added in March with an unemployment rate of 7.6 percent. But Friday’s report revised the number of jobs added that month to 138,000, and those added in February to 332,000 from 268,000.
A power station driven by hot-rocks technology has begun producing electricity in the far north-east of South Australia.
The innovative plant from Geodynamics is the first in Australia to produce power using an enhanced geothermal system, which draws hot water from underground rocks to heat other water above ground in pipes that produce steam to power a turbine.
In the U.S. a 2011 Google-funded study uncovered massive potential for accessible, renewable geothermal heat all across the country, including significant portions in the eastern states.
(READ the story from ABC News- Australia)
A school constructed in 2003 for children in Roxbury, Mass., was already mired in violence and failure when principal Andrew Bott showed up in 2010.
He shocked a lot of people when he got rid of the security guards and reinvested that money into the arts.
Soon everything at the K-8 school started to change.
Now, three years later, the Boston area school is almost unrecognizable; essays of achievement grace the walls and students from kindergarten to eighth grade fill the revamped studios with dance, music and art.
Besides the colorful posters decorating the hallways, student achievement is rising, test scores are up, and discipline rates are back down.
(WATCH both videos below, or READ the story from NBC)
Two Academy Award nominated films, Silver Linings Playbook, and Life of Pi, resonated with so many millions of people because their themes of resilience speak to each of us — and are grounded in a growing body of scientific research.
Far from being delusional or faith-based, having a positive outlook in difficult circumstances is the most important predictor of resilience — how quickly you will recover from adversity.
For starters, having a positive mood makes people more resilient physically, according to a study by Barbara Fredrickson, a psychological researcher at the University of North Carolina.
Esther Kacev’s cat Buddy, would not stop sniffing and trying to grab under her arm. After rescuing the stray cat several years ago, it was Esther’s turn to be saved.
The woman from Western Australia had read about the ability of some animals to sniff out cancer — and she had canceled her last several mammogram appointments — so she scheduled a trip to get the area checked.
“I never in a million years thought it would happen to me; in fact, I had turned down previous appointments because I felt so well and it wasn’t in the family,” Mrs Kacev told the Eastern Reporter.
A surprising trend is putting smiles on the faces of medical workers who are still coping with the aftermath of last week’s twin tragedies in Boston and Texas.
A nurse from North Carolina came up the idea of sending meals to the Boston hospital staffers who were continuing to treat victims of the Marathon bombings. Donations were collected from workers at Charlotte’s Carolinas Medical Center to send pizzas, which set off a volley of kindness.
Doctors and nurses at Mass General were so touched that they decided to extend the gesture to a hospital staff in Waco, Texas, where ER workers had been treating dozens of victims from the recent deadly explosions in the town of West.
“Avrey Walker is cancer free!!!! A total remission!” her father announced on their Facebook page last week.
Avrey was the seventh child to receive an experimental leukemia therapy at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the second whose response has resulted in a complete recovery.
The family was overjoyed to report the good news after living for years with an aggressive form of childhood leukemiathat was unresponsive to regular treatments.
Avrey’s doctors reported a complete remission of her disease— no evidence of cancer cells in her body—after treatment that used a novel cell therapy to reprogram her immune cells to rapidly destroy targets in leukemia cells.
Another of the patients, 7-year-old Emily Whitehead, was featured in news stories in December 2012 after the experimental therapy led to her dramatic recovery. Emily remains healthy and cancer-free one year after her T-cells were reengineered to lock-in and destroy targets found in cells carrying that lethal form of leukemia (acute lymphoblastic leukemia).
According to the children’s hospital, a third patient, a 10-year-old girl who also had a complete response to the same treatment, suffered a relapse two months later when other leukemia cells appeared that did not harbor the specific cell receptor targeted by the therapy. Using this data, the research team continues to refine their approach to using this new technology and to explore why some patients may not respond to the therapy or may experience a recurrence of their disease.
– READ the full story at Philly.com
– WATCH a video below about a similar treatment for adult leukemia patients (Mar. 2013)
Thirty five years ago, bassist Pete Sears’ prized custom bass guitar was stolen during the melee of a cancelled music festival in Germany.
After decades of mourning its loss, the former Jefferson Starship member will soon be reunited with the one-of-a-kind instrument, according to the Marin Journal.
Sears had barely had the chance to play the new Doug Irwin bass, nicknamed “Dragon” for it’s uniquely-shaped inlay, before looters made off with it during a riot at the 1978 festival, says the Huffington Post.
The British-born musician was devastated, but recounted last week on Facebook how he finally got it back, after all these years:
