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For Matebogo Victoria, attending a university in South Africa wasn’t easy. Victoria is deaf, and the university didn’t provide her with any of the support she needed to understand or communicate with her teachers. Instead, she went to her classes with a hearing person, who would then translate between speech and sign language.

Victoria knew she wasn’t alone. In South Africa, deaf people sometimes don’t complete school because communication is too difficult. That’s why she started Voiceout Deaf, a program that teaches farming skills to deaf people, giving them a way to earn a living.

“The government does not have facilities for communication [for deaf people]. A lot of deaf people did not finish school,” Victoria told the Associated Press. While South Africa has 44 schools for deaf people, not everyone lives near one of these schools. “They cannot afford to travel far to reach schools [for deaf people], so normally they decide to leave school early.” 

As part of Voiceout Deaf, farmers-in-training work at three different farms. They till, plow, plant seeds, and harvest produce. Most of the workers use sign language, making communication easy. Although the farm is a learning environment, it’s also a workplace and a business. The farmers get paid for their labor, and their produce is sold to customers, including some supermarkets. 

Just as school can be a challenge for deaf people in South Africa, so can many jobs. The nation’s government has a language board—a group of people who are responsible for promoting the use of South Africa’s languages. The board recently got South African lawmakers to make sign language the nation’s 12th official language. But sign language isn’t used everywhere. And sometimes, companies use technical words that are rarely used anywhere else. It takes a while to develop signs for those words. 

Voiceout Deaf is giving deaf people a chance to work in an environment where they will be understood and make the money necessary to live independent lives.

“I’m happy working here; it’s [a] pleasure working here in the farm,” Sibongile Maake told the Associated Press. “I’m working slowly but surely, and I am learning while also getting a salary. I can do things for myself.”

Jimmy Carter, who served as the 39th president of the United States, has died. He was 100. In addition to his work as president, Carter will be remembered for what he accomplished after he left the White House. 

James Earl Carter, Jr., was born in 1924 in the tiny town of Plains, Georgia. He grew up on his family’s farm. After attending college in Georgia, he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1946, the same year he married Rosalynn Smith. Carter served as an officer in the U.S. Navy for seven years. But when his father died in 1953, he and Rosalynn returned to Georgia to take over the family farm. 

Carter began his political career in 1962, when he was elected to the Georgia state senate. He became governor of the state in 1971. As governor, he voiced his opposition to racial discrimination at a time when many white leaders were reluctant to do so. 

“I say to you quite frankly, the time for discrimination is over,” Carter said in his first speech as governor. 

Carter was elected president in 1976. He worked to get funding to research sustainable solar and wind energy—a fairly new idea at the time—and spoke out against governments that violated their citizens’ human rights. He also helped negotiate a historic peace agreement between Israel and Egypt. Carter was not elected to a second term as president, due in part to voters’ unhappiness about high gas prices.

After leaving the White House, Carter worked for causes that were important to him, including democracy and human rights. He worked with an organization called Habitat for Humanity, which builds homes for people who could not otherwise afford them. Both Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter not only raised funds for the organization but also worked frequently on its construction projects. 

“To have a decent place to live is a basic human right,” Carter said in a 2017 interview with Bloomberg.com. “And also to have a chance to live in peace and to have…health care and…education, so you can take advantage of your talents.” 

President Carter also used his position as a world leader to travel around the globe, helping to work out disagreements between nations and monitoring elections to be sure they were carried out fairly. 

Leaders from around the world paid tribute to President Carter after his death. 

“To all of the young people in this nation and for anyone in search of what it means to live a life of purpose and meaning—the good life—study Jimmy Carter, a man of principle, faith, and humility,” U.S. President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden said in a statement. “He showed that we are a great nation because we are a good people—decent and honorable, courageous and compassionate, humble and strong.”

Click through the slideshow below for highlights from President Carter’s remarkable life.

Scientists have spent a long time studying how the dinosaurs became extinct, but a lot less is known about how these massive reptiles were able to become the dominant predators of their time. Now, researchers have begun to unravel this mystery. And it’s all thanks to dinosaur poop.

Poop fossils, which scientists call coprolites, contain a wealth of information about the animals that produced them. Their size is related to the size of the animals, and their contents include remnants of what the animals ate. So a group of scientists led by Martin Qvarnström of Uppsala University in Sweden studied more than 500 coprolites dating back 247 million to 200 million years. 

Farmers and elephants often don’t get along. With its massive size and hearty appetite, one elephant can destroy an entire harvest in a single day, endangering the farmer’s ability to survive. In Africa, farmers have sometimes killed elephants to stop them from eating crops. But farmers now have a solution that protects both the elephants and the crops—the careful placement of beehives.

Studies show that elephants are frightened of swarming bees and will usually leave an area when they know the buzzing insects are around. So an organization called Save the Elephants is helping farmers in several African nations to create beehive fences around their crops by attaching the hives to wires that surround the crops. 

The hives are several feet off the ground, so they’re somewhat protected from honey badgers, which aren’t afraid of bees; but the hives will get shaken if an elephant tries to pass through the fence. Once an elephant shakes a hive, the bees swarm, and the elephant runs away. Just the smell of the bees and the hum of their buzzing is enough to scare away some elephants. 

A father and son were looking for an ancient Roman road in a Polish forest when they came across a literal buried treasure: a trove of extremely rare coins dating back hundreds of years.

Sławomir Milewski and his son Szymon were taking part in a group effort to find the road in a wooded area near Warsaw, Poland’s capital city, when they found the coins in a shallow hole. Though the group never located the road, this other discovery was just as exciting.

“At first there was a great noise, because everyone who participated in the search—and there were a dozen of us—came running at the call of the discoverers, and we all realized that we had discovered something incredible,” Mateusz Sygacz of the Polish “Husaria” Treasure Hunters Association told All That’s Interesting.

A painting created by a robot has sold for more than one million dollars, raising new questions about what makes an artist.

The painting received 27 bids at an auction. It ended up selling for $1,084,800, a far higher amount than the predicted selling price of $120,000 to $180,000.

The artwork is a portrait of Alan Turing, an English mathematician who designed a code-breaking machine during World War II. Turing, who could be considered an early computer scientist, predicted that computers and artificial intelligence (AI) would become dominant in people’s lives. It was AI that enabled a humanoid robot named Ai-Da to create Turing’s portrait.

“We’re going into a post-human world where decision-making is not human,” Aidan Meller, who helped build Ai-Da, told CNN. “[The world is] increasingly algorithmic because we’ve seen it’s reliable…Ai-Da’s artwork is really showing you the potential future of where we could go.”

At just 18 months old, a bloodhound named Bo is still in the early part of his career with the Gastonia Police Department in North Carolina, but his ability to help humanity is already being recognized. Bo is the winner of the 2024 American Humane Hero Dog Award.

The award is meant to recognize “often ordinary dogs who do extraordinary things, whether it’s saving lives on the battlefield, lending sight or hearing to a human companion, or helping people achieve their goals,” according to American Humane, an organization founded to promote the welfare of animals. Bo emerged out of a pool of hundreds of nominees for his exceptional service.

Working with his handler, Sergeant David Rowland, Bo has saved multiple lives since he started his work with the Gastonia Police Department in October 2023. Using his keen sense of smell, the bloodhound located several missing people over the past year, including a child who had been kidnapped. He even tracked down suspects who were wanted for robbery, even though the materials he was given to pick up their scent had been contaminated with other scents.

Fourteen-year-old Ellyanne Wanjiku Chlystun remembers the first time she planted a tree.

“I remember at the time eating either an orange or lemon and I took the seed…and put it in the soil and then it started growing and sprouting,” Ellyanne told the BBC. “I fell in love with what I was doing, so I planted more.” Since then, Ellyanne estimates, she has helped get 1.3 million trees planted in her home country of Kenya and beyond. Trees not only absorb excess carbon dioxide but also help reduce the flow of floodwater.

“I feel so sad when it rains and nobody thinks of planting a tree,” Ellyanne told Nation. “When I see water going down the drain in residential areas, thereby causing flooding simply because there is no tree cover, it hurts me to the core,” she explained. Her newest goal is to get one trillion trees planted before she turns 18.

“I was brought up to believe that everything is possible, especially for me as a young person,” Ellyanne told the BBC. 

Ellyanne’s tree-planting campaign has grown into a larger effort to take on climate change and its effects. She has attended several climate change conferences around the globe, giving speeches and meeting world leaders. In a speech at the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Dubai, she pointed out that climate change brings on weather patterns that increase the spread of diseases such as malaria.

Ellyanne has also appeared in documentaries, including Save Our Wildlife, which features children from all over the world talking about how climate change affects wildlife. Ellyanne speaks about how droughts are threatening the survival of elephants.

Ellyanne says climate change affects everyone—and everyone can be part of the solution.

“[Environmental matters] are universal,” Ellyanne told Nation. “It doesn’t matter where you come from. We can all come together and make this planet a better place to live in than what we found.”

Have you ever known you were dreaming while you were dreaming? According to WebMD, about 50 percent of people have had this experience, which is known as lucid dreaming. Now, a study suggests that a phone app can help boost the chances of having a lucid dream.

Researchers at Northwestern University in Illinois built an app that they hoped would encourage lucid dreaming. App users are instructed to listen to a particular sound, such as several beeps, before bed and try to associate the sound with an awareness of their own mind and body. The app then repeats that sound six hours later, while the user is sleeping. The goal is to get the user back into a state of self-awareness so that they come to know when they are dreaming. 

The researchers tested the app on a group of 19 people. They asked the group how many lucid dreams they’d experienced in the previous week and found there was an average of 0.74 lucid dreams. The researchers then asked the 19 participants to use the app every night for one week and found the average number of lucid dreams increased to 2.11.

“That’s a really big increase for lucid dreaming,” Northwestern cognitive neuroscientist Karen Konkoly told Science News. “Lucid dreaming once a week is a lot.”

To test whether the app was responsible for the increased number of lucid dreams, the researchers gathered 112 people for another experiment. All 112 people were asked to listen to certain app sounds before bed. For one night, the app played these same sounds for everyone in the group while they were sleeping. But the next night, only 40 people heard these sounds. Thirty-five people heard different sounds while sleeping, and another 37 heard no sounds.

On the first night, 17 percent of the group had lucid dreams. On the second night, only 5 percent of the people who didn’t hear the before-bed sounds said they had lucid dreams. This suggests that the sounds people hear and practice with before bed can help train their brains to have a lucid dream when they hear the same sounds while sleeping. In other words, the app might work!

Could a bright yellow powder be the key to curbing climate change? Probably not, but it might help. Invented by a team of chemists at the University of California, Berkeley, the powder has demonstrated an ability to remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere.

Zihou Zhou, a graduate student studying chemistry at the university and one of the inventors of the powder, says the powder is made up of crystalline materials with large pores that can suck up carbon dioxide. Climate change is caused by the presence of too much CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere due to human activity. To address the effects of climate change, like warmer temperatures, melting ice, and more severe weather, it’s crucial to reduce the amount of CO2.

“It’s a monumental problem to take [carbon dioxide] out of the air because it’s mixed with other gases and it’s dilute; harmful, but dilute. And that makes it a supremely harder problem,” Professor Omar Yaghi told CBS News. Yaghi runs the lab at the university where he, Zhou, and others are investigating how chemistry can be used to address climate change.