A Childhood Bike Crash Led to a Stranger's Gift, and a Hidden Message
Ten years after a childhood bike crash, Rika Matsuda unfolded an origami crane a stranger who witnessed the crash had given her and found a message written inside -- a Japanese expression meaning...
View ArticleMeet the Retirees Turning Their Farms Into Wildlife Corridors
What if retirement offered an opportunity to give something back to the natural world? In Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, two retired neighbors, John Rice and John Sessler, are doing just that,...
View ArticleThe Coral That Heals
A bleached coral, stripped of its color and slowly starving, can come back to life in just seven weeks -- if it is placed in contact with a healthy twin. Researchers at Stanford University recently...
View ArticleThe Basketballer Who Assembled a Stranger's Vacuum
When a 94-year-old woman in Melbourne discovered that the new vacuum cleaner she wanted was sold out, she faced a disappointing trip home. But a stranger standing nearby overheard her predicament and...
View ArticleInto the Ocean at Dawn
Two days after her daughter died, Keri Jones walked back to the beach. Not because she had somewhere to be, but because she needed, as she put it, to give herself to the water. That instinct -- to seek...
View ArticleHow New York City Students Saved School Lunch
Leslie Gomez Rivera didn’t like anything about the cafeteria at her Brooklyn high school, and had little hope it would change. Then she heard about Youth Food Advocates that supports students to...
View ArticleHow a Group of Cherokee Youth Made History Fighting for a Sacred River
A group of Cherokee girls, ages 10 to 17, set out to protect a salamander and ended up making legal history. Guided by elders who told them to start with the water itself, the NAIWA Daughters spent a...
View ArticleOne Teen on How Emotions Give Memories Their Staying Power
A teenager's argument with his mother about sleep and forgetfulness led Amit Biligiri, a 16-year-old from California, to ask a question that turned into an award-winning podcast: why does the brain...
View ArticleHow I Tapped Back Into the Power to Feel Good at Sports
Julie Dickson grew up loving movement -- bikes, swimming, the easy joy of a body in motion -- until high school sorted everyone into "sporty" or not, and she quietly accepted she belonged to the wrong...
View ArticleBerlin Mapped 900,000 Street Trees. Now 12,000 People Water Them.
Amanda Gläser-Bligh has named her street tree Linda -- a linden, eight years old, growing outside her apartment in Berlin -- and once a week through the hot months, she carries 20 liters of water down...
View ArticlePeaceful Flower Garden becomes a Free 'You Pick' Haven
After wildfires and flooding tore through her northern Arizona community, Cindy Wilson faced a choice about the flowers she had planned to sell: hold on to what she'd built, or open her gate. She...
View ArticleThe women putting community at the heart of elephant conservation
When Dorothy Lowakutuk drove through the night across rain-soaked Kenyan plains to reach a bruised, newborn elephant, she was doing something that no Samburu woman had done before - and quietly...
View ArticleStudents and Elders Bridge the Gap
A graduate student researches her elderly friend's favorite sports team before each visit. A pianist plays "Yesterday" for a memory care ward. A woman tends friendships she describes as being done "in...
View ArticleTanzania's First Official Wildlife Corridor is Good News for Elephants
In Tanzania's Kilombero Valley, 368 farmers voluntarily gave up portions of their land so that elephants could walk safely between mountain rainforests and open savanna -- a negotiation seven years in...
View ArticleTheir Wedding Guests Couldn’t Make It, So Hundreds of Strangers Came Instead
Jayden and Kimberly arrived early on Hatteras Island in North Carolina for a small wedding with about 45 family members and friends expected to attend. But before the wedding day, a storm cut off...
View ArticleThe Blue Baby Dream That Took 50 Years
A bird keeps knocking at the window as Amy Fabrikant begins to speak -- and by the time she finishes, you understand why that detail matters. Over fifty years after her birth, she came to realize she...
View ArticleSix Million Trees, One Laser From a Plane
From a light aircraft skimming over the Scottish Highlands, a laser quietly counted six million trees -- and what it found beneath the canopy is quietly extraordinary. Cambridge researchers used LiDAR...
View ArticleWhen A Stranger Tucked In Her Son
She was alone with four children under seven, mid-immigration, mid-flight, mid-panic -- the kind of exhaustion that sits in your chest like stone. When the cabin lights dimmed somewhere over the dark...
View ArticleNairobi Is Transforming Neglected Libraries Into Vibrant Civic Hubs
When Sunil Totti needed a reliable place to prepare for a job interview -- somewhere the power wouldn't cut out mid-call -- he thought of Eastlands Library in Nairobi, a building he once avoided as "a...
View ArticleAfter Being Laid Off, She Gives Away 100 Cookies Every Weekend
Liz Tierney makes about 100 cookies on a weekend, and leaves them in one of the Little Free Libraries near her home. She began after being laid off from her job when “she spent a lot of time thinking...
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