Less than 60 years ago, interracial marriage was illegal in parts of the U.S. The landmark Loving v. Virginia case on June 12, 1967, set the precedent for interracial couples to be together without repercussions. NPR readers share their stories here of love and adversity in honor of Loving Day.
From the West African nation of Benin comes the ultimate story in intercultural exchange, whereby a young man inspired by Jackie Chan films took up kung fu and persisted to run the largest Chinese martial arts club in his country.
After just three days of intentional silence, the brain begins to physically and functionally rewire itself. A growing body of neuroscience shows that silence can spark changes in the brain comparable to months of meditation, cognitive training, or rigorous exercise.
Antarctica's ice sheet has grown for the first time in decades with an astonishing rebound. Four major glaciers have reversed their previous pattern of accelerated mass loss from 2011 to 2020 and instead showed significant mass gain during the 2021 to 2023 period.
In a first-ever call, members of Indigenous peoples and coastal communities pushed for a seat at the table of the high seas biodiversity treaty (Agreement on Marine Biodiversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction - BBNJ) as they convened at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues held in April, 2025 in New York City.
For seven years now, Pennsylvania Grade 9 English teacher Kristina Ulmer has been running a "$20 Kindness Challenge" with her class, giving each student $20, and asking them to do something kind with it. And every year, the teens in her class bring her to tears with their creativity, empathy and generosity.
On Tuesday, May 6, 2025 at 2 p.m., Quaker activists Bill Holcombe and Lewis Randa will be arraigned at Natick Framingham District Court for “disturbing the peace” after participating in peaceful, nonviolent civil disobedience on Inauguration Day, which coincided with the Martin Luther King Day of Service.
A man living with hand tremors for 30 years received an ultrasonic beam treatment at Delray Medical center in Florida, and is cured with what Dr. Lloyd Zucker calls his “magic trick." There are 79 centers in the country where this procedure is done and fully covered by Medicare.
New research published in the Journal of Pharmaceutical Analysis reveals how the most colorful, anthocyanin-rich fruits and vegetables could help defend your body against toxic microplastic exposure, especially offering protection to the reproductive system from microplastic damage.
Indore, a lesser known city of India ranks the cleanest for 8 years in a row following an all-hands-on-deck approach to improve and maintain hygiene standards. One corporate executive remarked, ”It feels as though you aren’t in India.”
The West Ada School District made national headlines recently when administrators ordered a school teacher to remove signs containing welcoming messages from her classroom. Community members quickly responded, ensuring the signs’ messages would be seen far beyond a single classroom.
Ireland announced on Wednesday a donation of 15 million euros ($16.3 million) to Brazil's Amazon Fund, which aims to stop deforestation and preserve the world's largest tropical rainforest. The donation is Ireland's first to the fund, raising the list of donors to eight countries.
Cambridge, Massachusetts has joined a growing list of cities that have banned gas-powered leaf blowers. The city’s ban went into effect over the weekend, and officials noted this move was in the interest of public health and reducing emissions for the environment.
Hollywood actor Michael Sheen has paid off £1 million in debt for 900 people impacted by Tata Steel’s blast furnace closure in Port Talbot, South Wales, which left 2,800 workers jobless five months ago. The actor launched a debt acquisition initiative, personally investing £100,000 to buy and cancel debts instead of profiting from them.
More than 14,000 seed samples are headed for the Svalbard Global Seed Vault this week, where they’ll be preserved and protected against climate change, war, and other events that can threaten crops and plant diversity.
With Japanese know-how and the unwavering support of Japanese experts, Bhutan’s national bird is being hatched and hand-reared in captivity successfully for the first time ever. The major hurdle to rearing chicks was overcome, and two healthy birds were just hand-reared.
Michael Jordan has opened another health clinic in his home state of North Carolina, bringing the total to four clinics now serving the uninsured. The concept began in 2019 with a pair of clinics strategically placed in Charlotte to address barriers to care, including transportation.
Just over a quarter (26%) of voting members in the U.S. Congress identify as a race or ethnicity other than non-Hispanic White, making the 119th Congress the most racially and ethnically diverse to date. In continuation of a long-running trend, this is the eighth Congress to break the record set by the one before it.
Fish are thriving in the River Seine, which is teeming with marine life once again, as it did centuries ago. For years, the storied French waterway was nearly biologically dead, but now, “the Seine is a wild place in the heart of Paris.”
In what has been a particularly turbulent week in global affairs, the choice of ‘kindness’ as Oxford Children’s Word of the Year for 2024 offers a reminder of the hope we carry for younger generations. According to teachers, the choice of ‘kindness’, was selected by 61% of the youngsters asked.
Scientists from University of Oregon (UO) and partners recently discovered a hidden gem beneath the Cascade Mountain range: an enormous aquifer with water in volumes much higher than had previously been estimated, and that is desperately needed in the West.
Norway is on the cusp of bidding farewell to internal combustion vehicles forever now that the automotive transition in the country has reached highway speeds as 9 out of every 10 cars sold in Norway last year was electric.
President Biden has banned fossil fuel drilling across 600 million acres of US waters, permanently protecting coastal waters spanning the entire Atlantic and Pacific coasts, as well as the eastern Gulf of Mexico and 44 million acres of the Northern Bering Sea, off the coast of western Alaska.
Many families in Western North Carolina were facing the holiday season still in need of the perfect housing, after Hurricane Helene devastated their towns. But this month, thanks to Lowe’s relief efforts and hundreds of volunteer home builders, 100 tiny homes were donated.
President Joe Biden signed a bill into law making the bald eagle the national bird, so the once-endangered species can now fly alongside other national symbols including the national tree (the oak tree), the national floral emblem (the rose), and the national mammal (the bison).
Despite the company’s public downplaying of the success and popularity of reusable glass bottles, Coca-Cola operates a thriving refillable glass bottle program in just this one US city, according to The Story of Stuff Project, which could be a key to tackling plastic pollution globally.
For more than a decade, About Fresh, a nonprofit dedicated to increasing access to fresh foods in underserved communities, has been working with All In, a mobile food truck that is now bringing affordable, fresh produce to families all over Boston. Wicked smart.
An adoption has been approved for Larry and Kelly Peterson, a couple with spina bifida, who have lovingly adopted daughter, Hadley, with the same condition, so they could offer her the love, support, and understanding she needed.
Starting in the fall of 2025, MIT students from families with incomes under $200,000 a year will not be charged tuition. Families making under $100,000 will not have to pay housing, dining or other fees, and they'll have an allowance for books and other personal expenses.
After a year-long decoding effort with these white dots arranged in five clusters against a black background, a father-daughter duo won the race to decode an extraterrestrial message sent from Mars to test humanity.
Scientists announced their discovery of the largest coral ever documented off the coast of the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific Ocean and celebrated the fact that the massive underwater ecosystem appears to be unharmed by planetary heating—but said the discovery underscores the need to urgently protect marine environments.
Your showerhead and toothbrush are teeming with viruses! But don’t panic – these tiny microbes are the natural enemies of dangerous pathogens and bacteria, and have enormous potential for the development of personalized antibiotics.
Technology expert Dino Ambrosi has made a startling revelation that perfectly underlines the big question of the smartphone era, and shares this one message that can get teens to rethink their screentime.
During his first diplomatic visit to a tribal nation as president on Friday, Joe Biden is expected to formally apologize for the country’s role in the Indian boarding school system, which devastated the lives of generations of Indigenous children and their ancestors.
More than 4,500 square miles of ocean will soon be protected by the federal government off the Central California coast. The Biden administration is creating a new national marine sanctuary, which will be the third largest in the U.S. The sanctuary is also the first to be led by Indigenous people.
After the Lakeside Center at McCormick Place, the largest convention center in North America, caused 1,000 bird deaths in a single night, a Chicago real estate company shelled out $1.2 million for sophisticated decals that will deter birds from crashing into its glass windows.
A 3-day strike by tens of thousands of dockworkers on the East and Gulf coasts, that could have seriously hurt the U.S. economy had it continued, has been called off following a tentative agreement on wages between the International Longshoremen's Association and the United States Maritime Alliance.
After 7 years of the Fluoride Action Network pursuing legal action against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the United States District Court of the Northern District of California has now deemed fluoridation an “unreasonable risk” to the health of children, and the EPA will be forced to regulate it as such.
For the first time in decades, national surveys compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show an unprecedented and unexplained decline of as many as 20,000 drug deaths per year nationwide, a huge reversal from recent years when fatal overdoses regularly increased by double-digit percentages.
A young woman’s attempted suicide on a bridge in Nashville was interrupted at the last minute by an unlikely hero. She was halfway there, then “Livin’ on a Prayer” singer Jon Bon Jovi appeared at her side and managed to talk her out of the life-ending decision.
Nearly 5,500 Oregonians have been moved out of homelessness and into housing thanks to persistence from a recently-appointed task force. This amounts to a 28% increase from the previous year, and the number of housing placements is the most seen in a fiscal year since the task force’s inception.
Buddhist nation Nepal and a drone manufacturer in majority Buddhist China, have signed an agreement to supply Mount Everest’s Buddhist authorities with heavy lift drones that will help clear trash off Everest’s holy slopes.
There wasn’t a dry eye among staff at Sydney’s Sea Life Aquarium as Magic and his fellow gentoo penguins cried out, mourning the loss of Sphen in an emotional scene never before witnessed by employees.
American billionaire philanthropist Michael Bloomberg has announced that a series of grants worth $600 million will be presented to five historically Black colleges and universities. The donations are being channeled specifically to the universities’ medical colleges.
The Biden-Harris administration has announced the issuance of $2.2 billion in discrimination relief payments to more than 23,000 individuals who were unfairly denied USDA loans for farming operations, as for decades, the federal government and banks discriminated against Black farmers, reported The New York Times.
The felling of the Sycamore Gap tree brought forth an outpouring of emotion last year, with local people and tourists alike left bereft by pictures showing it on its side. But the latest stage of the saga has brought some “astonishing” green shoots of recovery.
With its nine brains, the octopus has long been considered the most intelligent creature in the ocean, inspiring bipartisan legislation banning octopus farming, co-authored by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, to be introduced in Congress.
Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo fulfills her pledge and swims in Seine as cleanup operation makes water quality safe enough to host the Olympics just in time for opening ceremonies this Friday, July 26.
Most students pursuing medical degrees at Johns Hopkins University will receive free tuition, thanks to a $1 billion gift from businessman Michael Bloomberg's philanthropic organization. “As the U.S. struggles to recover from a disturbing decline in life expectancy, our country faces a serious shortage of doctors, nurses, and public health professionals," Bloomberg said.
The global pandemic plunged the entire world into economic free fall and societal unrest. Since then, one notable country has emerged successfully to stabilize global markets and calm fears—it’s the United States, which has maintained the lowest inflation rate of any major nation.
Find online and in-person classes, workshops, trainings, conferences, meditations, events, groups and more. Listings are free!
