Lay a young poplar on its side, surround it with light from every direction, eliminate gravity's pull — and watch what happens. Over time, the tree rights itself, pushing back toward vertical through a mechanism that looks, functionally, like a muscle. Researchers from France's INRAE have...
Wendell Berry spent 92 years insisting that the largest problems in the world are answered, first, in the smallest gestures -- a seed planted, a field tended, a pencil drawn across paper. The writer and farmer from Henry County, Kentucky, authored more than 50 books without a computer, was arrested...
On the morning of September 11, 2001, 38 planes descended on a small Canadian town of 12,000 people who had no plan, no warning, and no hesitation. Gander, Newfoundland -- perched at the edge of the Atlantic, closer to Europe than to most of Canada -- became an accidental refuge for 7,000 stranded...
At 96 years-old, Alice McGinty does resistance training three times a week, travels to Costa Rican jungles, and shows her paintings -- work that has grown more vivid and abstract since macular degeneration narrowed her world to color alone. What she is pushing against is quieter than any of that:...
On the wall of a laundromat in Wyoming, Ohio, four wire baskets hold books like Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel -- each one stickered with an invitation to "Read it, Love it, Pass it on." It's a small thing, and also not a small thing at all. The Laundromat Library League, now spanning more...
Natalie Porias never planned to lead an organization of professional clowns working in earthquake zones and hospices -- she just Googled "fundraising" and applied for an open internship in that department. Twenty years later, she's CEO of Red Noses International, and one of her greatest...
When Dadarao Bilhore lost his 16-year-old son to a motorbike accident caused by a water-filled pothole on a flooded Mumbai road in 2015, grief could have sealed him shut. Instead, a month later, he walked out with a shovel. In the years since, he has filled more than 1,450 potholes by hand -- most...
Xavier Ginesta built one of Spain's most celebrated companies — a global payments firm twice named a best place to work — and then sold it for over $100 million. Not to retire. Not to launch a startup. But because 2,000 people dancing in ecstatic joy made him realize, as he puts it, "it was so...
At the confluence of a bird's two windpipes, sitting directly over its heart, is a sound-making organ no larger than a lentil -- and from this tiny syrinx, a dozen rings of bone and two dozen muscles craft what biologist David Haskell calls the work of "quick-fingered jewelers of air." His...
An ant has a poppy-seed-sized brain and no map, no manager, no meeting -- and yet ant colonies reliably find the shortest path to food every time. This piece explores five surprisingly practical lessons in decision-making drawn from insects, and the wisdom is genuinely humbling. Ants reinforce...