No parent is ever prepared to hear that his or her child is anything other than happy and healthy and learning that one's child might have autism can be particularly frightening. But there are many ways in which special education can help improve the quality of life for children who suffer from Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).

As communication technology develops, people have access to more information than ever before, literally at their fingertips. But how many of us can say that we are truly well informed?

She is just 15 years old, but has already designed a smart device that generates electric power from raindrops. Reyhan Jamalova, a ninth grade student at the Istek Lyceum in Baku, Azerbaijan, and a friend, Zahra Gasimzade, assisted by their physics tutors, worked for four months running calculations and developing a device to harvest energy from rainwater.

A bottle of sauce to achieve freedom. This is the goal of SfruttaZero, a project born in Puglia, Italy, to give dignified work to the day labourers who flock to Italy's “heel” during the tomato harvest. The idea was born in the ghetto of the city of Nardò, where hundreds of migrants live packed together in shameful conditions and work in the fields on starvation wages while being subject to all kinds of abuse.

Aging populations are a problem for all EU countries. But Poland lags behind the rest regarding employment of senior citizens and their involvement in citizen initiatives. Countrywide, barely 10 percent of golden-agers devote some time to voluntary work.

Rabia Balkhi was one of the first female Persian poets. She was killed by her brother, a king, hundreds of years ago for falling in love with a slave and daring to write poetry in a male-dominated culture. Much like her, women of modern-day Afghanistan still face violence because of their writing (namely journalists), or are murdered because of love affairs.

There are few things worse than being neglected into oblivion. The olive trees of Oliete, a village in Teruel, Spain, were disappearing for this very reason until four years ago. Located in one of the most deserted areas of Europe and, due to rural exodus, Oliete's 100,000 olive trees seemed doomed to dry out and die until hundreds of “godparents” came to their rescue.

“My Swiss family is incredible. They have helped me so much,” says Morad Essa, a young Eritrean and the first migrant to be welcomed into a Swiss family. He arrived in 2015 in Lully, a small Vaudois municipality and the first in Switzerland to host migrants, a practice that has now taken off in several Swiss cantons.

Surgeons have one of the most demanding jobs in the world and deal with stressful situations daily. One such situation is verifying a patient's X-rays while operating. Normally, this means leaving the sterile environment of the operating room, losing vital time and increasing the risk of infection.

Adho mukha. Chaturanga. Uttanasana. These words are becoming part of the prison lingo in Argentina, thanks to a group of young yoga instructors who created the “Moksha – yoga in jail” project.

When Bill Gates famously suggested that “banking is necessary, banks are not” in the 1990s, it was seen as a deliberately provocative statement from one of the world's wealthiest men.

In remote parts of Nepal, young girls dread growing up. During their periods each month, girls and women are banished into menstrual huts, often located at the fringe of villages. Isolated in the name of tradition, they brave extreme weather and predators, including snakes, rapists and even death. Those who manage to remain in their communities are often too embarrassed to dry out their menstrual rag cloths after washing, thereby risking infection.

It all started when Edouard Claude Oussou witnessed an unsettling incident in Libreville, the capital of Gabon. A child was dropped off at school, waited a few minutes until his parent was far enough away, then took off in the opposite direction from his class. This fairly common scene illustrates a wider problem faced by Gabon's educational system, which has the

As communication technology develops, people have access to more information than ever before, literally at their fingertips. But how many of us can say that we are truly well informed?

Beyond the constant stream of negative news, there are many stories of hope and concrete solutions. Stories of changemakers tackling some of the world's most pressing issues with innovative ideas, in order to change the lives of millions for the better. Stories worth reading and spreading, not only to rebalance our view of the world, but to help these existing solutions be replicated worldwide.

Publishing disruptor Vincent Safrat is not only selling books like they're bread rolls – and at the same price as a baguette – but he's also

Following years of civil unrest, the Afghanistan National Institute of Music (ANIM) was opened in 2010 to offer kids of all social

An Apiary School project has been set up in the Djurdjura mountains of Algeria, inspired by the Association for the Promotion of

A college project devised by two students to redistribute food for sale in retail outlets close to its sell-by date has become a

Many men have boyhood dreams of building their own car. The vast majority grow out of the idea. But Ladislav Brázdil and his two