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Archive for the ‘Articles & Essays’ Category

In the tomato fields of Florida, fighting for our most exploited farm workers. At great personal risk — sweating, he says, through his fear — Lucas [Benitez] was the driver for a daring 2001 rescue of four Florida farmworkers who were brutalized and effectively enslaved by growers. He played an important role in convicting those [...]

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Wind power without the blades. Noise from wind turbine blades, inadvertent bat and bird kills and even the way wind turbines look have made installing them anything but a breeze. New York design firm Atelier DNA has an alternative concept that ditches blades in favor of stalks. Resembling thin cattails, the Windstalks generate electricity when [...]

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In pronoiac history: A stockbroker named Nicholas Winton brought 669 Czechoslovakian Jewish children to England, saving their lives. He refused to take credit for his deed until his wife found a scrapbook of the children that he saved and gave it to the BBC. He turns 103 this year. In October 1938, after the ill-fated [...]

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Flying free health care to those in need In 1985, decades after he first started flying, [Stan] Brock went the extra step and started a nonprofit, Remote Area Medical. Since then, the all-volunteer group has held more than 660 medical clinics worldwide, providing free health care to half a million people.

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Designing the world’s greenest new building standards. Against the century-old church next door, the modest, modern building that houses the science lab of Seattle’s private Bertschi School could seem out of place. Its metal roof glints in the daylight, a surrounding garden of native grasses rustles in the breeze, and in-ground windows offer a view [...]

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Healing war-torn, broken, and economically devastated communities through art. [Lily] Yeh is the founder of — and force behind — Barefoot Artists, an organization that revitalizes neighborhoods around the globe through the transformative power of art. In Palestine, that meant working with villagers to create a wall mural that Yeh calls “The Palestinian Tree of [...]

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World’s largest colony of endangered turtles found off west Africa. Discovery of up to 40,000 leatherback sea turtles may see species removed from critically endangered list The world’s largest colony of leatherback sea turtles has been identified by scientists, raising hopes that the giant creature may not be as endangered as previously thought. A new [...]

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10 Things Science Says Will Make You Happy The emerging field of positive psychology is bursting with new findings that suggest your actions can have a significant effect on your happiness and satisfaction with life. Here are 10 scientifically proven strategies for getting happy.

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“Lost” Long-Fingered Frog rediscovered in Africa after 62 years, scientists say. In a handy stroke of luck, scientists have rediscovered a “lost” African species: the Bururi long-fingered frog. Last seen in 1949, the 1.3-inch-long (3.2-centimeter-long) amphibian was found during a December 2011 biodiversity survey in the small central African country of Burundi, scientists announced in [...]

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A vaccine that can train cancer patients’ own bodies to seek out and destroy tumor cells has been developed by scientists. The therapy, which targets a molecule found in 90 per cent of all cancers, could provide a universal injection that allows patients’ immune systems to fight off common cancers including breast and prostate cancer. [...]

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Cities Take Up the “Ban the Bag” Fight. Why new policies across the nation could mean the end of plastic bags. The most recent city to join the effort to ban the bag is Portland, Ore., which has banned single-use plastic bags at the checkouts of large retailers. The change was met with overwhelming support [...]

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Dolphins deserve same rights as humans, say scientists Experts in philosophy, conservation and animal behaviour want support for a Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans. They believe dolphins and whales are sufficiently intelligent to justify the same ethical considerations as humans. Recognising their rights would mean an end to whaling and their captivity, or their use [...]

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Hope for Salmon as Dams Come Down. The destruction of two Washington State dams will restore depleted fisheries, create jobs, and maybe even change how we manage our rivers.

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Should happiness figure in a nation’s bottom line? And should the concept of Gross National Product be replaced by Gross National Happiness? Bhutan, the tiny Himalayan nation which tops Asia in the United Nations’ First World Happiness Report, convened the meeting seeking to develop a new economic model based on principles of happiness and well [...]

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6 Ways to Empower Others An empowering leader holds and serves a vision broad and deep enough to inspire others and allow them to take parts of it and make it their own.

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How Satire Can Save the World. In some of the world’s most dangerous, politically-stifled geographies — from Azerbaijan to Russia — activists are using comedy to say publicly what would otherwise be unspeakable. In all the recent debates about whether social media was responsible for movements like the Arab spring or the Tea Part [sic], [...]

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Work, Reimagined: Detroit Gets Creative. How residents of America’s most famously down and out city are building livelihoods that also rebuild their communities. And so began We Want Green Too, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to “re-educate, re-train and re-build a 21st-century, sustainable Detroit.” [Former Ford Motor Company employee] Gloria [Lowe] is working to [...]

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Nicaragua’s push to generate 94 percent of its own electricity from renewable resources by 2016 without damaging the environment has united the country. “The energy issue is an essential component for our sustainable development to assure the wellbeing and progress of the current and future generations,” says Emilio Rappaccioli, Nicaragua’s minister of energy and mines. [...]

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Corporate Rule Is Not Inevitable. 7 signs the corporatocracy is losing its legitimacy — and 7 populist tools to help shut it down. In a recent poll by the Pew Research Center, 77 percent of Americans said too much power is concentrated in the hands of a few rich people and large corporations. In a [...]

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Bottlenose dolphins playing with humpback whales I’d like to introduce a paper published last year in the journal Aquatic Mammals, which reports on two separate playful and – as you’ll see – uplifting encounters between bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) and humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae). The first took place on a January afternoon off the northwest [...]

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