Heroes
This Should Be Required Viewing For Deniers Of Evolution
Even the strongest defenders of science shouldn’t take it for granted. Here’s how we know this commonly misunderstood theory is in the right.
10.24.14
True
In 2024, it’s practically impossible to function as a nonprofit without the right digital resources. Nonprofits use computer systems and applications for things like education, fundraising, engaging clients, and communicating with donors. However, with limited funding and expertise, it's often difficult to get the digital tools they need to fully support their missions.
The planet needs nonprofit organizations, and nonprofits need better digital tools. For decades, Adobe has provided nonprofits with the tools they need to fulfill their mission—helping them with everything from social media advocacy to educational videos to graphic design. Now, Adobe is offering the pro version of Adobe Acrobat for Nonprofits, the most requested and comprehensive set of document and e-signature tools, for just $15 per user per year, which represents a 94% annual savings off the regular price. This will make it easier than ever for nonprofits to streamline business processes and increase their impact with engaging educational and fundraising assets – from annual reports, contracts and grant submissions to brochures and white papers.
Keep reading to hear more about how Adobe helped one nonprofit improve efficiencies and giveback potential – and how you can start using Adobe tools today for your organization.
A nonprofit success story
Albert Manero, a mechanical engineer and graduate of the University of Central Florida, founded Limbitless Solutions, Inc., as a passion project in a small lab. Today, Limbitless is celebrating its 10-year anniversary and has grown into an interdisciplinary team based at the University of Central Florida in Orlando that includes 50 interns with nine different fields of expertise. Their mission? To inspire and empower underserved communities through creative, accessible technology.
Manero and his team of experts create bionic, 3D-printed arms for children with limb differences. Combining visual storytelling with art and engineering, the Limbitless team wants children with limb differences to feel included and capable, while at the same time, able to express their personal identity more fully. Developing bionic arms covered in flowers or designed like Iron Man’s armor, kids with these bionic limbs can not only grip objects, hold hands and more, but can feel empowered to be themselves.
Using Adobe to make a difference
Limbitless, like many others, has utilized Adobe for Nonprofits offerings, which gives nonprofit organizations access to Adobe programs at a deeply discounted rate, including access programs like Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Express and Adobe Acrobat as well as Adobe’s 3D tools.
Adobe solutions are the oil that keeps organizations running smoothly behind the scenes. For the grant application and reporting processes, employees at Limbitless have credited Adobe Acrobat with helping the team secure funding and communicating clearly with donors and partners. With Acrobat, they’re able to create, edit, and manage PDF documents that look professional and polished. The company has also transitioned most of its internal documentation to digital formats using Acrobat. This includes everything from design blueprints, brand guidelines, intern contracts, and user manuals for bionic limbs.
Better tech for a better future
In addition to helping day-to-day operations run smoothly, Adobe has also helped bring Limbitless’ mission of inclusion and accessibility outside of office walls.
Using Adobe Express, the fast and easy create-anything app, Limbitless has been able to create quick how-to videos for young patients and their families that showcase how to use their bionic limbs, as well as a series of videos promoting STEAM (science, technology, engineering art and math) education. The company’s Operations, Advocacy, and Logistics team utilizes Express as well, developing content and visual assets for their social media accounts. Recently, Limbitless partnered with the Adobe Express’ Animate Characters team to create six unique, limb-different selectable avatar characters for their educational outreach and social media campaigns.
And Adobe is helping Limbitless empower kids with limb differences, too: Limbitless’ comic series, Bionic Kid, was created using Adobe Illustrator and features a superhero with limb differences who uses a Limbitless prosthetic arm. This inspired a fundraising concept initiated from the idea by a Limbitless prosthetic recipient Zachary Pamboukas, which has been used in fundraising efforts for more bionic arms and has already raised over $20,000.
Inside the organization and out, Adobe is enabling people to reach their full potential, contributing to better nonprofit organizations and, overall, a better world.
Learn more about the new Adobe Acrobat for Nonprofits offering and explore more ways Adobe can help your organization today.
Richard Symonds
This handsome gent just got some bad news.
In the ultimate mic-drop for chicken-or-egg debaters, Chromosphaera perkinsii, a billion-year-old unicellular organism, reveals that nature had "eggs" on the menu way before chickens (or any animals) arrived. But, though the mystery has been unscrambled, the discovery has cracked open an entirely new chapter in the story of life's origins.
Meet Chromosphaera perkinsii, a single-celled organism found in marine sediments off Hawaii that threw evolutionary biologists a curveball. This tiny protist, dating back more than a billion years, does something remarkable: it organizes itself into multicellular structures that look exactly like the earliest stages of animal embryos.
It looks like images you may have seen of early cell division, but this is of individual Chromosphaera perkinsii forming a colony. © UNIGE Omaya Dudin
Nature’s OG egg
Researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), led by Omaya Dudin, have spent years studying this humble organism, and the findings are nothing short of stunning. Unlike most single-celled creatures, C. perkinsii can coordinate cell division without growing larger. Instead, it creates colonies that resemble the first steps of animal embryonic development.
"Although C. perkinsii is a unicellular species, this behaviour shows that multicellular coordination and differentiation processes are already present in the species, well before the first animals appeared on Earth."
— Omaya Dudin
Even more mind-blowing? When scientists analyzed the genetic activity within these colonies, they found it eerily similar to what happens in the embryos of modern animals. The processes that allow embryos to grow from a single cell into a multicellular organism—a hallmark of animal life—were apparently hanging out in the evolutionary toolbox long before animals even existed.
A billion years of practice
The study, published in Nature, even raises the possibility that multicellularity evolved multiple times in different lineages, meaning the transition from single-celled life to complex organisms could be less linear (and more chaotic) than previously believed.
"It’s fascinating, a species discovered very recently allows us to go back in time more than a billion years."
— Marine Olivetta
The research could also reignite debates about mysterious 600-million-year-old fossils that look like embryos. Are they early animals or ancient organisms like C. perkinsii? Either way, this tiny protist suggests that nature was testing out egg-like developmental strategies long before anything resembling a chicken—or even a jellyfish—arrived on the scene.
The egg’s ultimate win
For anyone still clinging to the chicken in this debate, it’s time to throw in the towel. The egg wins by a landslide. And while these ancient “eggs” might not have shells or yolks, they set the stage for the evolutionary leaps that eventually gave us the breakfast staple we know today.
Still not convinced? Neil deGrasse Tyson shares the evolutionary approach to the puzzle. He bluntly points out that the egg came first; it was just laid by a bird that was not a chicken.
Discoveries like this remind us how much we still don’t know about the origins of life. If a billion-year-old protist can hold the key to one of our oldest questions, imagine what else nature has waiting for us in its archives. But one thing’s certain: we finally have our answer. The egg was here first, and it’s been waiting for us to catch up for over a billion years.
So, with that settled, we are now tasked with finding something else to argue about. Science has yet to weigh in on the tree in the woods. Perhaps that puzzle will be the next to fall.
Image from Pixabay.
Big smiles in class at kindergarten.
Every parent wants to see their kid get good grades in school. But now we know social success is just as important. From an early age, we're led to believe our grades and test scores are the key to everything — namely, going to college, getting a job, and finding that glittery path to lifelong happiness and prosperity.
It can be a little stressful. But a study showed that when children learn to interact effectively with their peers and control their emotions, it can have an enormous impact on how their adult lives take shape. And according to the study, kids should be spending more time on these skills in school.
Nope, it's not hippie nonsense. It's science.
Kindergarten teachers evaluated the kids with a portion of something called the Social Competence Scale by rating statements like "The child is good at understanding other's feelings" on a handy "Not at all/A little/Moderately well/Well/Very well" scale.
The research team used these responses to give each kid a "social competency score," which they then stored in what I assume was a manila folder somewhere for 19 years, or until each kid was 25. At that point, they gathered some basic information about the now-grown-ups and did some fancy statistical stuff to see whether their early social skills held any predictive value.
Here's what they found.
1. Those good test scores we covet? They still matter, but maybe not for the reasons we thought.
Back To School GIF by IFC - Find & Share on GIPHY
Meeting high expectations...
Billy Madison GIF from Giphy
Traditional thinking says that if a kid gets good grades and test scores, he or she must be really smart, right? After all, there is a proven correlation between having a better GPA in high school and making more money later in life.
But what that test score doesn't tell you is how many times a kid worked with a study partner to crack a tough problem, or went to the teacher for extra help, or resisted the urge to watch TV instead of preparing for a test.
The researchers behind this project wrote, "Success in school involves both social-emotional and cognitive skills, because social interactions, attention, and self-control affect readiness for learning."
That's a fancy way of saying that while some kids may just be flat-out brilliant, most of them need more than just smarts to succeed. Maybe it wouldn't hurt spending a little more time in school teaching kids about the social half of the equation.
2. Skills like sharing and cooperating pay off later in life.
Adam Sandler Pee GIF - Find & Share on GIPHY
Adam Sandler helps out a friend dealing with a stressful situations.
Billy Madison GIF from Giphy
We know we need to look beyond GPA and state-mandated testing to figure out which kids are on the right path. That's why the researchers zeroed in so heavily on that social competency score.
What they found probably isn't too surprising: Kids who related well to their peers, handled their emotions better, and were good at resolving problems went on to have more successful lives.
What's surprising is just how strong the correlation was.
An increase of a single point in social competency score showed a child would be 54% more likely to earn a high school diploma, twice as likely to graduate with a college degree, and 46% more likely to have a stable, full-time job at age 25.
The kids who were always stealing toys, breaking things, and having meltdowns? More likely to have run-ins with the law and substance abuse problems.
The study couldn't say for sure that strong or poor social skills directly cause any of these things. But we can say for sure that eating too much glue during arts and crafts definitely doesn't help.
3. Social behaviors can be learned and unlearned — meaning it's never too late to change.
Adam Sandler GIF of getting his groove on.
Billy Madison GIF from Giphy
The researchers called some of these pro-social behaviors like sharing and cooperating "malleable," or changeable.
Let's face it: Some kids are just never going to be rocket scientists. Turns out there are physical differences in our brains that make learning easier for some people than others. But settling disputes with peers? That's something kids (and adults) can always continue to improve on.
And guess what? For a lot of kids, these behaviors come from their parents. The more you're able to demonstrate positive social traits like warmth and empathy, the better off your kids will be.
So can we all agree to stop yelling at people when they take the parking spot we wanted?
But what does it all mean?
This study has definite limitations, which its researchers happily admit. While it did its best to control for as many environmental factors as possible, it ultimately leans pretty heavily on whether a teacher thought a kid was just "good" or "very good" at a given trait.
Still, the 19-year study paints a pretty clear picture: Pro-social behavior matters, even at a young age. And because it can be learned, it's a great "target for prevention or intervention efforts."
The bottom line? We need to do more than just teach kids information. We need to invest in teaching them how to relate to others and how to handle the things they're feeling inside.
Ignoring social skills in our curricula could have huge ramifications for our kids down the road.
This article originally appeared nine years ago.
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Amazing video shows 1950s mom of 7 without arms doing it all on her own
It may be difficult to imagine living in a world with limited technological assistance available but to do it while also physically disabled seems nearly impossible without extensive support. But that's exactly what people had to do for years and one mom made the news in the 50s for her unique experience raising children. Phyllis Lumley was born without arms and one foot six inches longer than the other in Battersea, London.
Her ability to care for her children, all seven of them, without any outside assistance is what seems to be the reason she garnered so much attention. A picture of the mom placing her baby in the bassinet along with a story of the large family made it to the Australian newspaper. Lumley's story is inspiring to others due to her sheer determination to figure out how to become a mother and homemaker successfully.
While the mom of seven didn't have arms or hands to assist her while her husband was working, in the interview conducted by British Pathé you see her utilize her feet and mouth to compensate. It's something she had become accustomed to since childhood, never letting her disability slow her down.
The many forms of technology that have become part of our daily lives simply didn't exist in the 50s. Same goes for the advancements in prosthetics and other assistive technologies, they were mere dreams for future generations to enjoy. Lumley was determined to live life on her terms and not the limited expectations of those around her. So when she and her husband decided it was time to start a family, Lumley practiced how she would care for an infant by practicing with a doll.
In 1954, she told Pix that though she faced strange looks and ill words as a child, when she became pregnant she found a clinic that treated her like any other pregnant person.
"Mrs. Lumley admits that when her first babies were very young, there were times that she seemed to be up against problems that were insoluble but she learned that if she thought hard enough she could find a way around every difficulty," Brittish Pathé narrates.
In the video, the mom uses her feet to comb her child's hair, button someone's sweater, iron clothes and thread a needle to embroider a handkerchief. Her ability to be a successful caregiver clearly caught the attention of the world at that time, especially since there weren't really any accommodations for disabled people back then, let alone robotic prosthetic arms.
Caring for 7 children isn't an easy task for able-bodied individuals but in a true sign of the times, Lumley did it with little to no help from her husband. The woman mastered managing a household at a time when childrearing and housekeeping fell solely on the mother most of the time, which is evident in the interview.
The video recently made it's rounds on social media where people were flabbergasted at Lumley's skills with someone writing, "The fact that she threaded a needle alone is mind blowing, and the fine embroidery!! That’s bonkers."
The Goldbergs Yes GIF by ABC NetworkGiphy
Another person says, "how tf does one raise seven kids with NO ARMS?? I've barely gotten by with BOTH my arms and two kids!"
"Fine motor skills with her feet is ridiculously impressive," someone else chimes in.
"I love the looks in her children’s eyes. You can see how much they adore her. This is one impressive Mama," one person shares.
Lumley clearly loved her children and stopped at nothing to make sure they were properly cared for even if she had to pave her own path to do it.