Going From Inmate To Master’s Degree
Geophysicist Philip Heron is on a mission to share the benefits of critical thinking through his program Think Like a Scientist, which he pioneered in the U.K. and has now brought to Canada, teaching the seven-week course not just in schools but surprisingly in prisons where it has been truly life-changing for participants. Dalton Harrison, […]
The MIT Researcher Saving Agriculture From Itself
Giorgio Rizzo, an MIT postdoc who grew up fascinated by nature in Palermo, Sicily, is developing next-generation sustainable fertilizers that could revolutionize agriculture by reducing its massive environmental impact while helping farmers increase crop yields without compromising soil quality or plant health. Rizzo is creating new fertilizer formulations that can be applied as seed coatings […]
What This Great-Grandmother Did At 90 Proves It’s Never Too Late
Maryette McFarland from Londonderry became the oldest of more than 300 graduates at the Open University’s ceremony in Belfast on Tuesday, finally earning her English Literature degree at age 90 after a 70-year journey that began in Dublin back in the 1960s. The great-grandmother had originally started her studies at Trinity Dublin but dropped out […]
This MUSHROOM-Powered Toilet Changes Everything
Researchers at the University of British Columbia have created a mushroom-powered waterless toilet that turns human waste into compost using mycelia, the root network of mushrooms, in what users are calling a beautiful experience comparable to a Scandinavian sauna. The MycoToilet, housed in a small cedar-sided building dropped among the trees at UBC’s Botanical Garden […]
The Wedding Photographer Turned Landmine Remover
Mofida Majzoub was a freelance wedding photographer in Lebanon when she saw an advertisement for female de-miners and made a career change that everyone in her life thought was absolutely crazy, joining the Mines Advisory Group that has now received the prestigious Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize worth $3 million. The organization has been removing […]
The Small Parade That Became Something Extraordinary
Thousands of people came together in Kansas City, Missouri, to throw a parade for three-year-old Tucker Langford, a brave little boy born with recessive dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa, also called butterfly skin because it causes blistering and extremely fragile skin that can become painful from even gentle touches. Despite his condition requiring constant loving care from […]
12-Year-Old BATTLES The World’s No. 2 Chess Player
Michelle Zhang, a 12-year-old chess player from Halifax, held world No. 2 chess player Hikaru Nakamura at bay for 65 moves during a first-round match at the Maritime Open Chess Championship in Prince Edward Island, putting up such a strong fight that the superstar admitted feeling nervous and concerned during their game. The young player, […]
From Babysitting to Educating Thousands Every Year
Ten years after being named the 2015 CNN Hero of the Year, Maggie Doyne has transformed what began with a plot of land purchased with her babysitting money into a global model for poverty alleviation in rural Nepal through her BlinkNow Foundation. The 38-year-old started her mission after high school when she met a young […]
The Career Pivot That Nobody Believed In
Neil Newbon, the beloved voice and motion capture actor behind Baldur’s Gate 3’s iconic vampire elf Astarion, revealed in a recent TEDx Talk how performance capture work in video games literally saved his life after he fell into $45,000 worth of debt and years of struggling to find acting work. The actor had once been […]
Professor’s Secret Gift Changed Student’s Life
When Silvana Clark’s parents moved to another state in 1971 right after her high school graduation without asking where she would live or if she was going to college, she found herself completely alone with barely enough money for tuition and toothpaste. Her high school drama teacher George Meshke, who had just taken a job […]