93-year-old Louise Edlen had been waving to students riding their school bus every day for five years in Arlington, Washington.
One day everyone on the bus noticed she wasn’t in her normal spot–and was gone for the next few days.
The bus driver discovered she had suffered a stroke, so she sent a greeting of flowers from her and the kids, which was just the beginning of their show of compassion.
(WATCH the video at NBC News)— Photo: Arlington Public Schools Facebook
With a small band known as Ho Hum, we went out onto the streets of Newcastle and asked the public to hum a tune of their choice, which the band would try and play along with.
At no time were they given the name of the tune – they just went by the hummers.
I was amazed at how easy-going the public were in getting involved, and the great tunes they gave us.
In northern Minnesota, most men either have played hockey in their youth or still are playing in a senior league – but this 94-year-old is still skating in 3-4 games a week, like a man half his age.
With handle bar mustache, Mark Sertich says, “You’ve gotta challenge yourself a little bit.”
“I think that’s what keeps you going.”
(WATCH the profile above from CBS’s Steve Hartman)
“I can’t believe I finally found my sister… I knew she was somewhere out there.”
But Holly never thought she would find that sister working in the very same hospital in the United States where she worked. An orphan from Korea adopted by an American couple when she was nine, there had been no record of a sister in the orphanage.
Meagan and Holly, 46, hired three months apart at Doctors Hospital in Sarasota, grew curious when they realized both shared the same last name of Shin.
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After “comparing notes on their dramatic similarities,” Meagan insisted they take a DNA test, which is how they unraveled the truth–that they grew up 300 miles from each other in Virginia and New York and each moved to Florida in their later years to pursue careers of service in the health profession. And the sisters wound up working on the fourth floor of the same hospital.
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“Oh my god,” Meagan told the Herald Tribune. “I was in shock. I have a sister.”
“I never gave up on her,” said Holly.
(WATCH the video below or READ the story from the Sarasota Herald Tribune)
Stanford engineers have created a plastic “skin” that can detect how hard it is being pressed and generate an electric signal to deliver this sensory input directly to a living brain cell. The work brings closer the day when a sense of touch is added to prosthetic limbs.
Zhenan Bao, a professor of chemical engineering at Stanford, has spent a decade trying to develop a material that mimics skin’s ability to flex and heal, while also serving as the sensor net that sends touch, temperature and pain signals to the brain. Ultimately she wants to create a flexible electronic fabric embedded with sensors that could cover a prosthetic limb and replicate some of skin’s sensory functions.
Bao’s work, reported Thursday in Science, takes another step toward her goal by replicating one aspect of touch, the sensory mechanism that enables us to distinguish the pressure difference between a limp handshake and a firm grip.
“This is the first time a flexible, skin-like material has been able to detect pressure and also transmit a signal to a component of the nervous system,” said Bao, who led the 17-person research team responsible for the achievement.
WATCH Boy Get New Bionic Arm From ‘Tony Stark’ Himself (Robert Downey Jr.)
The heart of the technique is a two-ply plastic construct: the top layer creates a sensing mechanism that can detect pressure over the same range as human skin, from a light finger tap to a firm handshake. The bottom layer acts as the circuit to transport electrical signals and translate them into biochemical stimuli for nerve cells.
Five years ago, Bao’s team members first described how to use plastics and rubbers as pressure sensors by measuring the natural springiness of their molecular structures. They then indented a waffle pattern into the thin plastic, which adds further springyness.
To exploit this pressure-sensing capability electronically, the team scattered billions of carbon nanotubes through the waffled plastic. Putting pressure on the plastic squeezes the nanotubes closer together and enables them to conduct electricity.
RELATED: Breakthrough Bionic Hand Restores Amputee’s Sense of Touch
The team then hooked this pressure-sensing mechanism to the second ply of their artificial skin, a flexible electronic circuit that could carry pulses of electricity to nerve cells.
Bao’s team has been developing flexible electronics that can bend without breaking. Through a partnership with researchers from PARC, a Xerox company, an inkjet printer was used to deposit flexible circuits onto plastic.
For the electronic signal to be recognized by a living neuron, a technique was used developed by Karl Deisseroth, a Stanford professor of bioengineering, that combines genetics and optics, called optogenetics. They bioengineered cells to make them sensitive to specific frequencies of light, then use light pulses to switch cells on and off from the electronic pressure signals in the artificial skin.
Bao said other methods of stimulating nerves are likely to be used in real prosthetic devices that could replicate, for instance, the ability to distinguish corduroy from silk, or a cold glass of water from a hot cup of coffee.
This will take time. There are six types of biological sensing mechanisms in the human hand, and the experiment described in Science reports success in just one of them. But the current two-ply approach means the team can add sensations as it develops new mechanisms.
“We have a lot of work to take this from experimental to practical applications,” Bao said. “But after spending many years in this work, I now see a clear path where we can take our artificial skin.”
Reprinted (in edited form) with permission from the Stanford News Service – Photo from Bao Labs, Stanford
This Summer I motorbiked across the Balkan States: I traveled 8,000 kilometers across 15 countries completely alone.
I’ve just published a 2-minute video about the trip with all the beautiful sights I saw. Enjoy! – Jacob Laukaitis at Chameleon John
When groundwater started disappearing in the Indian state of Rajasthan, Bhagwati Agrawal invented a way to tap a “river in the sky.”
For most of the year, Rajasthan is so dry, people use sand to clean their dishes. But during monsoon season, there is plenty of rain — enough water to last villages for an entire year if they could capture enough of it.
Agrawal invented a way to do that, a water collection system called Aakash Ganga – Hindi for “River from the Sky” – which now supplies 10,000 people with year-round clean, healthy drinking water.
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A public-private partnership rents rooftops and sets up collection networks of pipes and underground storage tanks. Part of the rain captured by his system goes to the homeowner, the rest through a series of pipes to community reservoirs.
Agrawal is spreading the systems through Indian villages through his nonprofit, Sustainable Innovations, but he’s also spreading a better quality of life. When families no longer have to spend precious time hauling water long distances, adults can spend more time working and children can spend more time in school.
In the villages where he’s deployed the rain harvesting systems, overall health has improved and dairy cattle are producing twice as much milk.
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His work has made Agrawal one of CNN’s Top Ten Heroes of the Year.
You can vote for him as your choice for Hero of the Year at CNNHeroes.com. The network will announce the winner at their annual televised award show December 6, and present the 2015 winner with $100,000 for continuing his or her good work.
(WATCH the CNN video below) — Photo: CNN video
Arizona State University is just giving away MBA degrees.
OK, students still have to study and complete the program — but it won’t cost incoming MBA students a penny next year.
There are 85 students in this year’s 2015 class, but starting next fall, up to 120 new students will have their entire tuition for the MBA program paid in full.
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ASU’s W. P. Carey School of Business wants to attract non-traditional business students, such as people who want to work for nonprofits but might be scared away by the normally high tuition — $54,000 for in-state students, $90,000 for out of state residents.
The tuition giveaways are coming from a $50 million dollar donation from real estate tycoon William Carey. The donation not only spurred ASU to name its business school after him, but paid for the recruitment of new faculty.
The school’s administrators decided it was time to start using some of Mr. Carey’s donation to help students.
Administrators want to see what kind of business majors they will attract if cost isn’t a barrier — and what those graduates might be inspired to create if they didn’t have student loans on their back.
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The Carey School of Business is regarded as a top school in its field, with 90% of graduates landing jobs within three months of graduation paying an average of $90,000.
The school hopes these grateful alumni will repay some of the free education with donations or mentoring of business students in the future.
(READ more at the Wall Street Journal) — Photo: Kevin Dooley, CC
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Scientists for decades have been searching for similarities between a placenta and a tumor, because both grow so aggressively. Now they have stumbled upon one–and inadvertently, a possible powerful treatment for multiple kinds of cancer.
The researchers were looking for something completely different — a vaccine to protect pregnant mothers and their children from malaria – and in their quest found a malaria protein that effectively destroyed 90% of a wide range of cancer cells, from leukemia to brain tumors.
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They noticed the carbohydrate that the malaria cells attach itself to in the placenta is identical to the one found in cancer cells. They then took the protein in malaria and added a toxin to it, turning it loose on cancer. The modified malaria protein latched onto cancer cells in the tests, released the toxin, and destroying almost all cancer cells in their tracks.
Since scientists use only the protein created in a laboratory instead of the actual malaria cell, there’s no risk of the patient developing malaria.
The teams working at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and the University of British Columbia in Canada published their findings this week in the journal Cancer Cell.
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“It appears that the malaria protein attaches itself to the tumor without any significant attachment to other tissue,” said an optimistic Thomas Mandel Clausen, a Ph.D. student at the University of Copenhagen. “And the mice that were given doses of protein and toxin showed far higher survival rates than the untreated mice. We have seen that three doses can arrest growth in a tumor and even make it shrink.”
“I think there’s some irony to the fact that you can take a serious disease such as Malaria…and then use it to target another dreadful disease,” said Mads Daugaard, Senior Scientist at Vancouver Prostate Center, and one of the authors of the research.
Human trials for the cancer treatment are now being planned.
(WATCH the video below) — Photo: National Institutes of Health
A nonprofit grocery store offers healthy foods and a boost of self esteem for less fortunate customers.
Founder Kurt Vickman lets people volunteer to work in his Good Grocer store in Minneapolis, Minnesota for discounts on food. Every item in the shop is marked with two prices — one for regular customers, another, 25% lower price for people who volunteer to work in the store.
We love seeing that Membership card at work! Anyone can shop at Good Grocer, but working Members help keep our prices...
Posted by Good Grocer on Tuesday, August 4, 2015
Volunteers keep the prices in check by cutting labor costs – and some people donate their time without taking the discount, so the money goes back into the store.
Good Grocer has an emphasis on fresh produce to promote healthy diets. While it doesn’t fit the pattern of modern food co-ops, its volunteer business plan is similar to early model cooperative stores.
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The store has about 375 members but Vickman says most customers are non-members who pay the higher prices to help keep costs low for other people in the community.
Vickman came up with the idea while running a food bank and noticing how difficult it was for people who came there to ask for help.
“Because people weren’t able to contribute something, whether it’s their time or money, I think it eroded people’s dignity and … sense of self-motivation,” Vickman told the Star Tribune.
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Allowing people to work gives people back their dignity and the self-motivation is easy to see. Volunteers provide 75% of Good Grocer’s labor and community leaders say they’ve seen neighbors take a “sense of ownership” in the store by donating their time.
Photos: Good Grocer, Facebook
This device doesn’t just suck soot out of the air—it repurposes the stuff as printer toner.
Anirudh Sharma, co-leader of a student-run science lab at MIT, has invented something called Kaala, a device that adds alcohol and oil to polluted air and creates printer ink.
The idea first came to him while channeling childhood memories.
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“(It was) a minor itch that led me to build something cool from observations arising from nostalgia of the days back in India,” he said on the device’s website. “There’s so much soot/pollution around us, in crowded cities. What if the same could be repurposed to generate ink for printers?”
Sharma, a Masters student and Research Assistant at the Fluid Interfaces Group, also wrote that he believes the model makes good business sense for existing ink providers.
“Companies like HP/Canon make 70 percent of their profits by selling these cartridges at 400% margin.”
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Sharma is basically an unstoppable force of human innovation.
He won the ‘Innovator of the Year’ award from the MIT Tech Review TR35 for his work designing footwear to provide the visually impaired better mobility, by connecting insoles to your smartphone via bluetooth that will guide you hands free.
(WATCH the video below to see how ink is made) Photo: Kaala video
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While many college students subsist on ramen noodles, this culinary genius is running one of New York’s highest-Yelp-rated new eateries out of his dorm room.
Jonah Reider is the creator of “Pith,” an exclusive dining experience that only serves four people at a time. He whips up five to eight-course meals for just $10 to $20 a person – all prepared in his Columbia University dorm’s common kitchen.
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The college senior began cooking for friends and classmates, but when word spread about his intricate menus, people outside the school decided they wanted to sample his fare.
He began taking reservations through Yelp!, where he’s racked up a nearly impossible to achieve five-star rating.
Pith already has a wait list of hundreds of people and is booked solid through January.
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Reider, an economics major, said that he’s not really sure he wants to make cooking a career, but for now, he’s happy to be the toast of the town.
(WATCH the video below from WNBC or READ more at Grub Street) — Photo: WNBC video
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This stuffed kangaroo may not be its real mama, but it’s a pretty great surrogate, providing comfort for a possum rescued by a wildlife group.
Little Bettina, now four months old, was recently found alone in the Sydney suburb of Mosman, Australia.
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These photos of the possum cozying up to the toy during sleep time and feeding time show the wee marsupial is recovering well.
The brushtail possum of Australia is named because of its resemblance to the opossums of the Americas, the most common marsupial in the Western Hemisphere.
The soft animal gives the baby possum a chance to cling to something wooly using her claws and teeth, which is what it would do with a natural mother in the wild.
The Taronga Wildlife Hospital staff also carries Bettina around in a pouch. When she is strong enough, she will be released back into the wild.
Photos: Taronga Zoo Facebook
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As world leaders sit down in Paris to decide how to cut greenhouse gas emissions, 14 corporations with massive carbon footprints have officially joined the call to rein in these atmospheric contributors to global climate change.
The companies, which include oil producers Shell and BP and coal mining giants BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto, issued a joint statement calling the UN Climate Change conference a “critical opportunity” to address the threats of climate change.
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“As businesses concerned about the well-being of our investors, our customers, our communities and our planet,” the statement reads, “We are committed to working on our own and in partnership with governments to mobilize the technology, investment and innovation needed to transition to a sustainable low-carbon economy.”
“These are companies with real skin in the game–either they’re large emitters or their products are,” said Bob Perciasepe, president of the Center for Climate & Energy Solutions, which organized the statement.
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Almost 200 countries are taking part in the Paris conference with the goal of having a global agreement by the end of this year on how to cut carbon emissions that lead directly to climate change.
Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and PG&E, also joined the call for action.
(Photo (top) John LeGear; (homepage) Scheherazade Al Arab, CC)
A desire to make things right has gotten this Parks Department one step closer to helping local kids with special needs join their friends on the playground.
Earlier this week, the Public Works Department in Orem, Utah received an anonymous letter from someone apologizing for taking part in the vandalism of a city park bathroom in 1990.
It read:
“Many years ago in my youth, I and a couple of friends vandalized the bathroom partitions at Bonneville Park on 800 West. I regret the actions of my youth but need to make right the financial burden I created. I am including money that would or should be able to cover that expense.”
The writer enclosed $500 to make things right again.
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None of the employees at the city’s Parks Department remember the vandalism from 25 years ago, but they do plan to put the money toward an “All Abilities Playground” the city is building.
When it opens in the spring, this new addition will let kids with mobility problems, even kids in wheelchairs, join their friends for play dates in the park.
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It’s one of those ‘feel good’ stories that makes you believe in humanity,” Reed Price, with Orem’s Public Works department told KSL News.
(WATCH the KSL News video below) — Photo: City of Orem, Facebook
Sean Gobin was a hero long before CNN nominated him for the title this year.
He completed three deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan before leaving the service in 2012. Still dealing with the memories and emotions of combat, he set out to “walk off the war,” hiking all of the nearly 2,200 miles of the Appalachian Trail.
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About two thirds of the way through, Gobin realized he’d been processing all the emotional turmoil built up from years in Iraq and Afghanistan. He realized other veterans must be going through the same things and thought if the months he’d spent on the trail had helped him cope, it could help others, too.
Gobin founded Warrior Hike, a non-profit that provides equipment and supplies for veterans to make long distance hikes.
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“It’s just like a deployment, except instead of going to fight a war, your mission is to be a civilian again,” Gobin told CNN.
Spending two to six months in the woods, communing with nature, meeting supportive people along the trails, and hiking with other vets helps combat veterans put the memories of war in perspective.
The costs of outfitting for such extreme hikes can be beyond most veteran’s budgets. Warrior Hike provides food, camping gear, and all the other hiking essentials for vets to spend months on the trail.
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His work has made Gobin one of CNN’s Top Ten 2015 Heroes.
You can vote for him as your choice for Hero of the Year at CNNHeroes.com. The network will announce the winner at their annual televised award show December 6, and present the 2015 winner with $100,000 for continuing his or her good work. See more of the Hero stories here.
(WATCH the CNN video below) – Photo: CNN video
An underwater prankster that talks like a human is stirring up conversation off the Southern California coast.
The beluga whale that was tamed in the 1970s by the U.S. Navy to find and retrieve sunken torpedoes and mines has become, it seems, an enthusiastic member of a team of humans–and now, wants to communicate like his pals.
Apart from his goofy and curious nature, nothing was especially unusual about Noc’s life with the Navy Marine Mammal Program (NMMP) – until he started chatting up the divers over the intercom.
While two divers were fixing up the whale enclosures underwater, they thought they heard the radio buzz with an order to get out of the water. When they resurfaced, their supervisor insisted he had issued no such request.
The order had come from Noc.
After the marine trickster’s first verbal episode over the radio, the beluga couldn’t contain himself. Sam Ridgeway, co-founder of the NMMP, got to work recording Noc’s outbursts.
Strangely enough, the whale would gab away with his human friends all day long, but never with the other belugas in the program. Ridgeway assumes this is because of Noc’s connection to his trainers. Belugas normally travel with pods of about 25 other whales, but Noc’s trainers became his adopted family.
“[The whales] come to think of us as family,” Ridgway told Smithsonian magazine. “And that’s the reason they stay with us. We have no way of completely controlling them, and yet they do their job and always come back.”
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Using the nasal cavities, Noc builds up pressure until he’s fit to blow, then uses the organ responsible for echolocation to release the air in oral bursts though his lips in a process that sounds unnervingly like human conversation.
There have been rumors in the past of hearing whales imitate human sounds in the ocean before, but Noc is the first ever recorded beluga, and the most articulate warbler, by far.
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SHARE this Whale of a Tale–Click below… Photo Credit: Steve Snodgrass, CC
If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to stand suspended over a 980-foot canyon, plan on taking a walk over this 1,410-foot-long glass-bottomed bridge in Wulingyuan National Park.
With towering sandstone-quartz pillars and dramatic scenery blanketed in lush vegetation, the park located in the Hunan province of China is a breathtaking area of natural beauty, and best known as the landscape that inspired James Cameron’s movie Avatar.
The Zhangjiajie Glass Bridge will be the highest glass-bottomed bridge in the world when it is completed at the end of this year.
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The designer responsible for the bridge, Israeli Architect Haim Dotan, strove to minimize its impact on the wider beauty of the park.
“I believe in nature, balance, and beauty. Nature is beautiful as it is,” he said. “One wants to make the least impact upon it. Therefore, the bridge was designed to be as invisible as possible–a white bridge disappearing into the clouds.”
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Two steel side beams will be used to frame a series of glass panels, and suspended cables will support the banisters. As a result, the bridge should achieve the impression of feather-like lightness.
Yet, it balances ethereal lightness with super-strength. The structure is projected to be able to withstand high winds, earthquakes, and the weight of 800 visitors.
Declared China’s first national park in 1982 and named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992, Wulingyuan has welcomed an increasing numbers of visitors, tourists who have been accommodated with a series of man-made interventions that provide maximum access to points of interest.
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The park already boasts structures like the Tianmen Mountain Cableway, which carries visitors over some of the most spectacular terrain of the park, and the 1070-foot high Bailong Elevator – the world’s tallest glass elevator – which debuted in 2002. In 2011, the park also opened the glass skywalk on Tianmen Mountain, allowing park-goers to skirt its sheer cliffs.
When it opens to the public in January of 2016, the Zhangjiajie Canyon Bridge promises to be the park’s most daring attraction to date.
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As tuition costs continue to rise at colleges around the U.S., a pair of small, private, liberal arts colleges are slashing theirs by 40%.
Beginning next year, Utica College in New York will reduce tuition from $34,000 to $20,000 per year, and Rosemont College outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania plans to cut its annual cost from $33,000 to $18,500.
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Both schools call it a “tuition reset” — taking a step back from a national trend of skyrocketing education costs that have spiraled upward even more sharply since the 2008 recession. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that tuition costs have more than doubled since 2000, while the average family’s income level has remained relatively the same.
“We’ve had escalations and our families simply are hitting a ceiling that they can no longer afford,” Utica President Dr. Todd Hutton told CNBC.
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Leaders of both colleges say the “reset” promises to let families keep “significant amounts” of money while still gaining a quality education.
(WATCH the video below from CNBC) — Photo: RaubDaub, CC
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If this billionaire’s plan to power remote Indian villages through stationary bike pedaling catches on—well, they actually won’t need a whole lot of his 5-Hour Energy Drink.
Manoj Bhargava became a billionaire almost overnight thanks to those little energy-infused shots, and now, he’s eager to give away 99 percent of his fortune to help others.
He’s starting with a plan to bring a special kind of stationary bike to impoverished regions, one that converts human energy into electricity capable of lighting an entire household.
With just one hour of pedaling, the bikes will generate enough energy to power a home all day and night.
The bikes were developed by Bhargava’s Stage 2 Innovations lab in Farmington, Michigan. They cost about $100 apiece, and work by spinning a turbine to create electricity that’s stored in a built-in battery.
The lab will test 50 of the bikes in villages across northern India early next year.
The bikes aren’t the only philanthropic innovation being developed by Bhargava’s team. As seen in the new free documentary “Billions in Change,” Stage 2 Innovations is also figuring out how to make saltwater drinkable, find ways to develop cheap and clean geothermal power, and improve health outcomes for the poor.
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“If you have wealth, it’s a duty to help those who don’t,” Bhargava says in the film.
Bhargava funded the lab after signing the Giving Pledge created by billionaires Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett, who have collected promises from nearly 140 wealthy families pledging to donate 99% of their millions to charity.
(WATCH the video below or READ more at National Geographic)
