A 15-Year-Old's Bucket List Goes Viral
Alice Pyne, 15, has been battling a deadly form of cancer for the last four years that is now spreading throughout her body. Last week at her mother's suggestion the teenager started a blog for friends and family, titled "Alice's Bucket List" and included her life wishes (high on the list were swimming with sharks and having everybody sign up as bone marrow donors). No one anticipated the tidal wa... posted on Jun 13 2011, 13,708 reads

How One Teenager Used Her Life Savings
After finishing high school in New Jersey, Maggie Doyne took a gap year during which she did service projects and cultural programs in South Asia. In India, she met a teenage refugee who had escaped Nepal seven years earlier. Maggie felt moved to accompany the girl back to Nepal in search of her family. In the process, she was deeply touched by the orphans she met in the villages. "It was really t... posted on Jun 12 2011, 16,224 reads

Four Myths About Mentoring
When people think of mentoring, they often think of an older executive counseling a young upstart. The senior leader advises the junior employee on his career, how to navigate the world of work, and what she needs to do to get ahead. But mentoring has changed a lot in the last few decades. The traditional mentor-mentee relationship is not necessarily a thing of the past, but it's no longer the sta... posted on Jun 11 2011, 8,286 reads

Female Auto Mechanic Breaks Stereotypes
Aside from a thin coat of powder, there's nothing superficial about 32-year-old Sarah "Bogi" Lateiner. Big-hearted and brilliant, Bogi graduated Phi Beta Kappa and did it in three years with a double major in pre-law and women's studies. Her plan was to go to law school and become a champion for women on a global scale. Although in the end, she decided to go with her plan B, instead. "I had in my ... posted on Jun 10 2011, 5,512 reads

A Teacher's Act of Calm Bravery
Last Friday, Martha Rivera was teaching her kindergarten class in Mexico when a drug shoot-out began outside her school. She immediately asked her 15 kids to place their faces on the floor and repeatedly told them that everything was going to be fine. While gunshots rang out, Rivera led her students in a Spanish-language version of a song from the TV show "Barney and Friends." They sang about choc... posted on Jun 09 2011, 4,782 reads

Cup of Compassion and Grandma's Beautiful Hat
"Suddenly, we heard the sirens of a fire truck and an ambulance parking in front of our house. We are new in this neighborhood, moving in only 3 months ago; opening the door I noticed that some paramedics were running up the stairs of our front neighbor's house. On the side walk, a woman in her thirties was in deep commotion crying on the phone. A scared, desperate 13 year old was half way up the ... posted on Jun 08 2011, 8,359 reads

A Letter to Myself at Land's End
Last year, a CharityFocus co-founder embarked alone on the Camino de Santiago, a pilgrimage of 900 kilometers traversed on foot. A little over a month later, she finished the journey at Finisterre (Land's End) on the western coast of Spain, where she composed a powerful letter to herself, brimming with quiet, timeless insight. "There's so much that I've learned from walking the thirty-seven days. ... posted on Jun 07 2011, 22,753 reads

How the Ancient World Used Color
Were ancient Greece and Rome filled with dignified white marble statuary? Not a chance. Though we still think of them in terms of white marble sparkling under a hot Mediterranean sun, a new exhibition shows at least one Greco-Roman lady as they really were -- in technicolor. Under Stanford sophomore Ivy Nguyen's skillful watch in the Cantor Arts Center lab, long-dead colors on marble have indeed ... posted on Jun 06 2011, 5,582 reads

The Most Vital Lessons for Starting Over
In his famous Lectures on Physics, Richard Feynman presented this interesting speculation: "If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words?" Fascinated by Feynman's question, Seed magazine posed a similar one to a number of leading th... posted on Jun 05 2011, 17,237 reads

100 Places to Go Before They Disappear
Last year, global carbon emissions hit a record high, and the latest science tells us that we're almost certainly locked into roughly 2 degrees Celsius (or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming. It might not sound like much, but 2 degrees Celsius will redraw maps, change landscapes, and force cities to deploy aggressive adaptation measures. A new book by Abrams Books, 100 Places to Go Before They Dis... posted on Jun 04 2011, 14,913 reads