Joining several zoos experimenting with computers and apes, a Miami zoo is letting its six orangutans use an iPad to communicate as part of a mental stimulus program to keep them from getting bored or depressed.
Orangutans are extremely intelligent but limited by their physical inability to talk. The devices help them communicate with humans who don’t know their sign language, but they also provide fun and enrichment, especially favorite apps like DrawFree and Flick Kick Football.
Joining several zoos experimenting with computers and apes, a Miami zoo is letting its six orangutans use an iPad to communicate as part of a mental stimulus program to keep them from getting bored or depressed.
Orangutans are extremely intelligent but limited by their physical inability to talk. The devices help them communicate with humans who don’t know their sign language, but they also provide fun and enrichment, especially favorite apps like DrawFree and Flick Kick Football.
US highway deaths declined again last year, reaching their lowest rate, when compared to miles driven, since record-keeping began in 1921, according to government data. Overall, traffic fatalities have plummeted 26 percent since 2005. –Associated Press
A 32-year-old British woman paralyzed from the chest down has finished the London marathon after 16 days of walking with the help of a “bionic” suit.
Although Claire Lomas was not eligible to receive a medal, more than a dozen runners donated theirs, in a touching tribute after an Olympic rowing champion launched a Twitter campaign to get her one.
She walked almost two miles per day saying that her spinal cord injury “didn’t change who she was inside.”
Her inspiring effort also raised $150,000 for spinal research.
(WATCH the ABC video below and READ the story with photos in the UK Sun)
Sometimes big companies actually do good things for their employees during bad times. And keep on doing it, quietly, without making a fuss.
United Technologies Corp., a hard-nosed industrial conglomerate that makes things like aircraft engines and elevators, reached an unusual milestone: spending $1 billion on a program to send its employees to college.
At 108 years old, Alice Herz-Sommer is the world’s oldest survivor of the holocaust. During WWII she survived a Nazi concentration camp in Prague while most of her family was exterminated. But through it all she was smiling and thankful and looked for the good.
She still plays piano every day, a lifelong talent she credits as saving her from the war.
The film producer responsible for the Hangover films teamed up with a young inmate to create an innovative college program that allows hundreds of prisoners to study and live together in prison. It rewards good behavior and those who want to learn.
So far 75 inmates have graduated and those who finish the program are far less likely to return to their troubled ways — a three percent recidivism rate, compared to the average 60 percent.
(WATCH the video from ABC News)
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There is an extraordinary sign on the outside of a well-tended West Yorkshire vegetable garden: “Help yourself.”
It is part of the expanding “sharing revolution” across the UK. Sweet corn grown around town is for all to take, orchards planted to bear fruit is free for the taking. Commuters can snip fresh herbs from pots outside the railway station.
It’s all kept weeded by an army of local people who give up an hour or so on the occasional Sunday.
“Community empowerment, social enterprise, co-operative, it has various titles, but it’s quietly getting huge,” said Mike Perry of the Plunkett Foundation, a thriving national organization supporting such enterprises nationwide.
(READ the story in the Guardian)
Near the junction of the New Jersey Turnpike and Interstate 80, not far from the conga line of traffic grinding toward New York City, lies a body of water that was once a garbage dump, a murky soup of stinking refuse and plastic bottles.
But after a recent renaissance, that body of water, Overpeck Creek, and the new park abutting it have become a destination for rowers from New York City.
Three years ago, Bear was a 100-pound Shiloh German shepherd nobody wanted at a Texas shelter.
Monday, he was given the 30th National Hero Dog award by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals for rescuing Debbie Zeisler from numerous seizures since his adoption. Even without formal training, the dog can sense each and every episode before it happens.
The 5 year-old dog from Milsap, Texas is a living testament to how being kind to animals can deliver the ultimate reward.
Three years ago, Bear was a 100-pound Shiloh German shepherd nobody wanted at a Texas shelter.
Monday, he was given the 30th National Hero Dog award by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals for rescuing Debbie Zeisler from numerous seizures since his adoption. Even without formal training, the dog can sense each and every episode before it happens.
The 5 year-old dog from Milsap, Texas is a living testament to how being kind to animals can deliver the ultimate reward.
Vanessa Cantu considers herself an incredibly optimistic person. When she was a freshman in high school she was involved in a serious car accident. Her seat belt didn’t work and without its support her spine broke and she suffered severe, internal injuries. She was kept in an induced coma for weeks. When she woke up she wanted to know why she couldn’t feel her legs.
Vanessa Cantu considers herself an incredibly optimistic person. When she was a freshman in high school she was involved in a serious car accident. Her seat belt didn’t work and without its support her spine broke and she suffered severe, internal injuries. She was kept in an induced coma for weeks. When she woke up she wanted to know why she couldn’t feel her legs.
Treated to a hero’s welcome, Turkey’s prime minister met Syrian refugees Sunday for the first time since his country opened its doors to tens of thousands of Syrians fleeing their government’s crackdown on a popular uprising.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed to defend the rights of the Syrian people, saying they were close to achieving success. He was greeted by joyous Syrians at the largest refugee camp near the border.
As Sudan and South Sudan sink into full-scale conflict and hostile rhetoric nine months after the country split in two, people from both sides of the border are tweeting a very different message, one of peace, solidarity and frustration with their leaders.
These voices are galvanized around the hashtag ‘#NewSudans’ and includes Tweets like, “I’m not Arab, I’m not African, I’m not Afro-Arab, and I don’t belong to any tribe, I’m just Sudanese. I’m not from Khartoum, nor from Omdurman, I’m from Sudan.”
When Costas went on safari in the late 90s, he knew he’d arrived in the land of his dreams.
But he began to see how unjust it was for him and his European guests to have all the comforts of home — fresh water, baths, as much food as they could eat — when the villagers had to get their water from the same pool their animals drank from, when they could die of malaria because they didn’t possess the pennies needed to buy preventive medicines.
So he stayed on in Tanzania and created an eco-friendly lodge, using the proceeds to help the locals.
After surviving a year and a half of homelessness in the early 1980s, Lucinda Yates moved back to Portland and started putting her life back together by waitressing.
But her true breakthrough came in August 1988, when she noticed some colorful mat boards in a frame shop’s trash can. She pulled the discarded boards out of the garbage and started cutting them into elementary shapes, eventually creating a pin that looked like a house. Yates sold the pins to a local homeless shelter for $6, which in turn sold the pins for $10 to raise funds.
To date, Designs by Lucinda has sold more than 5 million pins, raising more than $25 million for thousands of nonprofits in the U.S. and globally.
(READ the story in the Huffington Post)
A girls’ school in Saudi Arabia has defied a religious ban on female sports by erecting basketball hoops and letting pupils play at break-time, the daily al-Watan reported on Wednesday.
The school in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province has now become the first state-run girls school openly to encourage sports, Watan reported, quoting a supervisor as saying it would expend pupils’ energy “in a positive way.”
Three months after releasing captive-bred frogs belonging to a critically endangered species, conservationists reported they are surviving well in their new home on the island of Montserrat.
In 2002, after a fatal fungal disease left only two uninfected populations remaining there, a partnership of conservation groups set out on an emergency rescue mission to airlift 50 of the frogs from the island, who were then bred in captivity and prepared for reintroduction to their homeland.
A gray whale that had been tangled in a fishing net for more than three weeks as it swam up the California coast was finally disentangled Thursday by a fishing boat crew out of Bodega Bay.
The elusive whale, nicknamed June, had been on the run and out of sight for two weeks when she swam near Mark Anello and his two-person crew as they were setting crab traps off the Sonoma coast.
(WATCH the video or read the story from CBS-San Francisco)
