Just One Thing: Be Amazed
Sometimes noticing the little things make us realize how truly amazing life can be. Showing love, being forgiving and taking time to be awed by things we take for granted, like the beauty of a butterfly or the power of a hug, can be powerful reminders to be grateful. Read further to be reminded of how beautiful life can be.... posted on Jan 13 2015, 25,483 reads

Building Peace One Teenager At A Time
At times, it seems as if world peace is an impossible dream. Every evening, our television screens bear witness to the violence that invades our societies. And yet, we never lose faith that someday we might once again find our way. Efforts like Seeds of Peace give us reason to believe we can still transform our world. This initiative brings children together from conflict zones across the globe an... posted on Jan 12 2015, 5,323 reads

Brilliant Impersonators: Celebrating The Rip-Off
Inventors are our heroes -- the geniuses who keep progress surging forward. Copycats -- we call them pirates -- are a threat. But according to researchers, throughout human history, innovation has been fueled and sustained by imitation. Copying is the mighty force that has allowed the human race to move from stone knives to remote-guided drones. We're natural-born rip-off artists. To be human is t... posted on Jan 11 2015, 5,195 reads

Building Empathy In Healthcare
Doctors are now being taught the communication of empathy, along with the ability to understand patients' emotions, in the hope that it can facilitate more accurate diagnoses and more caring treatment. In an interview, Dr. Helen Riess, the founder of Empathetics, discusses her innovative work on fostering empathy in the physician-patient relationship and its implications for improving healthcare d... posted on Jan 10 2015, 15,265 reads

Which Countries Are The Happiest?
Is it income or social inclusion that determines the level of happiness one feels? To what extent, if any, does geography contribute to one's happiness? In a study of more than 40,000 students representing 200 countries, researchers examined these questions to try to arrive at the science of happiness. Read on for the results and to see if your country is represented in the study!... posted on Jan 09 2015, 35,062 reads

From Rwandan Garbage Dump To Harvard
After 2-year old Justus' parents vanished during the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda, he lived in a stripped-out car in the Kigali City Dump, surviving on food scraps thrown out by nearby restaurants and hotels. Six years later, Clare Effiong was driving through Rwandan dirt roads in a taxi cab, looking for ways to "do good." Her intuition told her to pull over when she saw a group of children, including ... posted on Jan 08 2015, 23,815 reads

6 Promising Trends For The New Nature Movement
When we view nature as a collection of resources, it's easy to lose sight of our place in the greater scheme of life on planet earth. Fortunately, more and more research is affirming what many feel in their bones: that connecting with the natural world is intimately tied to our health and development. Here are six promising trends for those striving to reintegrate nature into the lives of children... posted on Jan 07 2015, 27,189 reads

Former Orphan Creates Safe Haven For Street Kids
Crouching in the back of a van is a young boy with a fresh injury. He'd been hit with a bottle when he got into a fight. Stanislas Lukumba, a tall, good-looking, fortyish nurse, checks for shards of glass as the driver shines his cell phone on the wound. For the past eight years, Stanislas has made nightly trips in the van, a mobile clinic that runs in Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo.... posted on Jan 06 2015, 15,306 reads

10 Ways To Live Simply In 2015
We are now entering radically changing times -- and it's only natural for our worldly expressions of simplicity to evolve in response. For more than thirty years Duange Elgin has explored the "simple life" and articulated it for tens of thousands of people all over the world. To Elgin, the most accurate way of describing this approach to living is with the metaphor of a garden. Here he describes 1... posted on Jan 05 2015, 71,720 reads

Giving People A Hand Up, Not A Hand Out
I saw Joe sweeping up New York City's detritus, dressed in the familiar blue pants and shirt of Ready, Willing & Able. Four months out of prison, he said, "I've learned my lesson, but the situation was pretty dismal." That's when he turned to the Doe Fund, as tens of thousands of homeless men and ex-cons have done since 1990. Today the Doe Fund's 400 fulltime employees (some 70% of them graduates ... posted on Jan 04 2015, 30,654 reads