Courtney Tharp's fellow high school students aren't at all surprised that she was named homecoming queen this week. They love her smile, her enthusiasm and her upbeat attitude about everything. Who cares if she struggles with fine motor skills or has some speech difficulties? Diagnosed with cerebral palsy when she was 9 months old, Courtney, now 17, found out on Monday night that her fellow seniors wanted her to be their queen.
Seventy-eight-year-old Tona Herndon of Oklahoma was already vulnerable in every way when her purse was stolen while visiting her husband's newly dug grave. The thief's mugshot flashed across the TV screen after he was caught and 15-year-old Christian Lunsford recognized the culprit to be his wayward father. Then, the 15-year-old did something remarkable.
A 13-year-old boy, Easton Gamoke, scored a full-court shot for his Minnesota basketball team in the last second of the game, bringing his team to victory last weekend. Not only that, he recreated it the next day on his first try.
Doctors had once counted her out, but next week, this teen will be walking alongside her graduating classmates to get her high school diploma.
A Florida student who lost his mother to leukemia and became homeless, has finished every homework assignment on time and finished with a 4.65 grade-point average to become valedictorian of his class. Griffin Furlong always clung to one belief: Never give up, which is written inside his baseball cap.
This teen was washing windows at the fast food restaurant when he stopped to offer an elderly woman a "touch of heaven."
She lived her whole life happily in Atlanta, but if not for the spontaneous actions of a soldier at the U.S. border, her life would be drastically different.
For years, doctors dismissed complaints that she was dizzy, tired, and weak, but she never stopped trusting her heart, insisting something was wrong.
A 17 year-old in Montreal saw a man mistreating a woman and decided to get involved. A policeman said in his 24 years, he's never seen anything quite like what the teen did.
When she was seven, Blakely Colvin had to endure three years of chemotherapy to counter the effects of a rare auto-immune disease, but her empathy for child cancer patients really kicked-in when she was in eighth grade and heard about another student her age who was diagnosed with leukemia and forced to quit school to battle the cancer. Without even knowing the boy, she decided to help his family and give him a reason to smile again. Her inspiration came from her love of baking and cupcakes. Her desire to make a difference in the life of just one cancer kid has in five years blossomed into a cupcake charity empire spanning fifteen states that has raised more than $85,000 to help children like Kevin.
16-year-old Allyson Ahlstrom of Santa Rosa, Calif., wasn't satisfied with the idea of underprivileged teen girls settling for wearing used clothing from a thrift shop. At an age when outward pressures can easily threaten a girl's self esteem, she should be able to look her best and take pride in her appearance. That's why Allyson created Threads for Teens, a clothing boutique that gives girls in need a confidence-booster when they walk out the door with two brand new head-to-toe outfits. This month she was named one of 15 teen Huggable Heroes and awarded $10,000 in cash and a $7,500 educational scholarship for her outstanding work.
Regular family suppers contribute to good mental health in adolescents, according to a study co-authored by McGill University professor Frank Elgar. Despite the fact that teens may squirm under the barrage of parental questioning, there are benefits to these family meals -- regardless of whether or not they can easily talk to their parents.
Tracy Lynn DelValle of Gardner, Massachusetts posted a story and photo on Facebook proving that (in her words), Not all kids nowadays are thoughtless. It only took them 30 seconds to respond to an elderly lady laboring to shovel snow.
A start-up in Northern California is working on creating solar windows that could act as solar panels while also blocking sunlight from entering office buildings to reduce their energy needs. The company, Pythagoras Solar won a $100,000 prize last week in the GE Ecomagination Challenge, for its idea.
The tech sector is fueling a job boom that stands in stark contrast to the malaise of the general job market. Competition for cloud computing engineers, security experts, and mobile developers as well as sales professionals in the technology industry has gotten so fierce that companies are going to greater lengths to woo prospective employees.
An innovative financing mechanism for achieving the green jobs and carbon cuts mandated in New York was passed last week by the state legislature. The Power NY Act funnels energy savings from individual electric bills to the cause of financing energy efficient retrofits on one million buildings and homes.
Are you tired of misplacing your keys, remote control or iPad? A clever invention called Stick-N-Find can help you find anything within 100 feet using your smart phone and Bluetooth. The application uses small tokens that you can affix to anything -- a device, a child or an animal -- for instant location using your Apple or Android phone. 4,500 people on the internet were impressed enough with the device that they've funded the project to the tune of $340,000.
Is it a solar cell? Or a rechargeable battery? Actually, the patent-pending device is both. The inventors at Ohio State University call it the world's first solar battery.
Current wireless networks have a problem: The more popular they become, the slower they are. Researchers at Fudan University in Shanghai have just become the latest to demonstrate a technology that transmits data as light instead of radio waves, which gets around the congestion issue and could be ten times faster than traditional Wi-Fi.
Beginning next year, New York will replace the city's pay phone booths with 10,000 new wi-fi kiosks that can connect 250 devices to the internet simultaneously. They will feature keypads to make calls on, charging stations and tablets with connecting speeds 20 times faster than the average home.