# data[].attributes.body
"When given the choice between being right and being wrong.... choose right"

Dr. Wayne W Dyer

# data[].attributes.body
Mensaje de Lissi Velásquez

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
El mensaje mas lindo de Lizzie Velasquez que conmueve al mundo (Subtitulado al Español)

# data[].attributes.body
Madre Teresa de Calcuta
Religiosa

La madre Teresa de Calcuta se convirtió en el ejemplo viviente de la generosidad y la humildad hacia los demás. Fue la fundadora de las Misioneras de la Caridad, y su objetivo siempre fue “ayudar al más pobre de los pobres”.

Su nombre real era Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, nació el 26 de agosto de 1910 en Uskub, Macedonia. Era la hija más pequeña de Nikollë Bojaxhiu y Dranafile Bernai.

Fue a una escuela pública, donde decidió que se uniría al coro y también a una congregación religiosa de misioneras llamada Sodalicio Nuestra Senora. Allí escuchaba las historias de las misioneras que habían ido a trabajar a Bengal y se emocionaba, soñando con ir a trabajar a la India y ayudar a la gente que vivía en las calles.

A los cinco años de edad hizo la comunión, más tarde se confirmó y a los doce años de edad decidió que su vocación sería ayudar a los demás y dedicarse a la vida religiosa.

A los ocho años, cuando su padre murió en extrañas circunstancias, su madre decidió educarla en la religión cristiana.

A los 18 años, cuando alcanzó la mayoría de edad, decidió embarcarse en un viaje a Dublín donde empezó a estudiar magisterio y se unió a la congregación de Nuestra Señora de Loreto y cambió su nombre a “Teresa”.

Durante casi veinte años se dedicó a ser profesora, pero cuando se dio cuenta de la profunda pobreza de la India, decidió pedirle al Papa un permiso especial para abandonar la congregación de Nuestra Señora de Loreto y dedicarse a cuidar a los pobres que habitaban las calles, y en 1948 abrió su primer refugio.

En 1950, fundó las Misioneras de la Caridad. Ella y sus seguidoras cuidaban a los pobres que estaban en las calles de la India, sin importar su edad, su físico ni su religión.

En 1964 abrió un refugio para leprosos, y hasta convenció al Papa para abrir un refugio para indigentes en el Vaticano.

Se la eligió como la representante para la Conferencia de las Naciones Unidas, y en 1979 ganó el Premio Nobel de la Paz.

En 1982 fue elegida para ser la intermediaria en un conflicto con Líbano, pero había tantos intereses políticos que su ayuda no fue de gran utilidad y decidió que se mantendría al margen.

Hacia 1986 su salud comenzó a decaer y su corazón se hizo débil. En 1989 tuvieron que colocarle un marcapasos, y en 1993 se infectó de malaria en Nueva Dehli, lo que empeoró sus problemas de corazón.

Ya que estaba tan débil, tuvo que ceder su puesto en las Misioneras de la Caridad a una de sus seguidoras, la hermana Nirmala, una mujer hindú que había decidido convertirse a la religión cristiana.

Unos días después de celebrar su 87 cumpleaños, la madre Teresa tuvo que ser ingresada en un centro de cuidados intensivos de Calcuta, donde permaneció hasta que murió en Octubre de 2003.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Emmanuel Kelly The X Factor 2011 Auditions Emmanuel Kelly FULL - YouTube.flv

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Video that will change your life. I have no words left.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[].name
él pensó que su papá era un fracaso hasta que descubrió su hermoso secreto

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Él pensó que su papá era un fracasado hasta que descubrió su hermoso secreto. Comparte este vídeo con tus amigos, amigas, tus hermanos y vecinos, es importante que este mensaje en realidad sea visto por todo el mundo.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A Brother's Devotion to His Special Needs Sister Will Break You Down Into Tears

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
(Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu; Skopje, actual Macedonia, 1910 - Calcuta, 1997) Religiosa albanesa nacionalizada india, premio Nobel de la Paz en 1979. Cuando en 1997 falleció la Madre Teresa de Calcuta, la congregación de las Misioneras de la Caridad contaba ya con más de quinientos centros en un centenar de países. Pero quizá la orden que fundó, cuyo objetivo es ayudar a "los más pobres de los pobres", es la parte menor de su legado; la mayor fue erigirse en un ejemplo inspirador reciente, en la prueba palpable y viva de cómo la generosidad, la abnegación y la entrega a los demás también tienen sentido en tiempos modernos.

La Madre Teresa de Calcuta

Nacida en el seno de una familia católica albanesa, la profunda religiosidad de su madre despertó en Agnes la vocación de misionera a los doce años. Siendo aún una niña ingresó en la Congregación Mariana de las Hijas de María, donde inició su actividad de asistencia a los necesitados. Conmovida por las crónicas de un misionero cristiano en Bengala, a los dieciocho años abandonó para siempre su ciudad natal y viajó hasta Dublín para profesar en la Congregación de Nuestra Señora de Loreto. Como quería ser misionera en la India, embarcó hacia Bengala, donde cursó estudios de magisterio y eligió el nombre de Teresa para profesar.

Apenas hechos los votos pasó a Calcuta, la ciudad con la que habría de identificar su vida y su vocación de entrega a los más necesitados. Durante casi veinte años ejerció como maestra en la St. Mary's High School de Calcuta. Sin embargo, la profunda impresión que le causó la miseria que observaba en las calles de la ciudad la movió a solicitar a Pío XII la licencia para abandonar la orden y entregarse por completo a la causa de los menesterosos. Enérgica y decidida en sus propósitos, Santa Teresa de Calcuta pronunció por entonces el que sería el principio fundamental de su mensaje y de su acción: "Quiero llevar el amor de Dios a los pobres más pobres; quiero demostrarles que Dios ama el mundo y que les ama a ellos".

En 1947, como culminación de aquella dilatada lucha liderada por Gandhi, la India alcanzó la independencia. Un año después, Teresa de Calcuta obtuvo la autorización de Roma para dedicarse al apostolado en favor de los pobres. Mientras estudiaba enfermería con las Hermanas Misioneras Médicas de Patna, Teresa de Calcuta abrió su primer centro de acogida de niños. En 1950, año en que adoptó también la nacionalidad india, fundó la congregación de las Misioneras de la Caridad, cuyo pleno reconocimiento encontraría numerosos obstáculos antes de que Pablo VI lo hiciera efectivo en 1965.

Teresa de Calcuta

Al tiempo que su congregación, cuyas integrantes debían sumar a los votos tradicionales el de dedicarse totalmente a los necesitados, abría centros en diversas ciudades del mundo, ella atendía a miles de desheredados y moribundos sin importarle si profesaban el cristianismo u otra religión: "Para nosotras no tiene la menor importancia la fe que profesan las personas a las que prestamos asistencia. Nuestro criterio de ayuda no son las creencias, sino la necesidad. Jamás permitimos que alguien se aleje de nosotras sin sentirse mejor y más feliz, pues hay en el mundo otra pobreza peor que la material: el desprecio que los marginados reciben de la sociedad, que es la más insoportable de las pobrezas."

En concordancia con esta palabras, Santa Teresa de Calcuta convirtió en el premio de una rifa un coche descapotable que le dio el papa Pablo VI durante su visita a la India en 1964 (regalo a su vez de la comunidad católica) y destinó los fondos recaudados a la creación de una leprosería en Bengala; posteriormente convencería al papa Juan Pablo II de abrir un albergue para indigentes en el mismo Vaticano.

El enorme prestigio moral que la Madre Teresa de Calcuta supo acreditar con su labor en favor de "los pobres más pobres" llevó a la Santa Sede a designarla representante ante la Conferencia Mundial de las Naciones Unidas celebrada en México en 1975 con ocasión del Año Internacional de la Mujer, donde formuló su ideario basado en la acción por encima de las organizaciones. Cuatro años más tarde, santificada no sólo por aquellos a quienes ayudaba sino también por gobiernos, instituciones internacionales y poderosos personajes, recibió el premio Nobel de la Paz.

Teresa de Calcuta: "El trabajo que hacemos no tiene nada de heroico. Cualquiera que tenga la gracia de Dios puede hacerlo."

Consciente del respeto que inspiraba, el papa Juan Pablo II la designó en 1982 para mediar en el conflicto del Líbano, si bien su intervención se vio dificultada por la complejidad de los intereses políticos y geoestratégicos del área. Desde posiciones que algunos sectores de opinión consideraron excesivamente conservadoras, participó vivamente en el debate sobre las cuestiones más cruciales de su tiempo, a las que no fue nunca ajena. Así, en mayo de 1983, durante el Primer Encuentro Internacional de Defensa de la Vida, defendió con vehemencia la doctrina de la Iglesia, conceptiva, antiabortista y contraria al divorcio.

En 1986 recibió la visita de Juan Pablo II en la Nirmal Hidray o Casa del Corazón Puro, fundada por ella y más conocida en Calcuta como la Casa del Moribundo. En el curso de los años siguientes, aunque mantuvo su mismo dinamismo en la lucha para paliar el dolor ajeno, su salud comenzó a declinar y su corazón a debilitarse. En 1989 fue intervenida quirúrgicamente para implantarle un marcapasos, y en 1993, tras ser objeto de otras intervenciones, contrajo la malaria en Nueva Delhi, enfermedad que se complicó con sus dolencias cardíacas y pulmonares.

Finalmente, tras superar varias crisis, cedió su puesto de superiora a sor Nirmala, una hindú convertida al cristianismo. Pocos días después de celebrar sus 87 años ingresó en la unidad de cuidados intensivos del asilo de Woodlands, en Calcuta, donde falleció. Miles de personas de todo el mundo se congregaron en la India para despedir a la Santa de las Cloacas. Seis años después de su muerte, en octubre de 2003, y coincidiendo con la celebración del 25º aniversario del pontificado de Juan Pablo II, la Madre Teresa de Calcuta fue beatificada en una multitudinaria misa a la que acudieron fieles de todas partes del mundo. A finales de 2015, el Vaticano aprobó su canonización; el 4 de septiembre de 2016, ante más de cien mil fieles congregados en la plaza de San Pedro, el papa Francisco ofició la ceremonia que elevaba a los altares a Santa Teresa de Calcuta, cuya festividad (5 de septiembre), incorporada al santoral católico, se celebró por primera vez al día siguiente.

Cómo citar este artículo:
Fernández, Tomás y Tamaro, Elena. "". En Biografías y Vidas. La enciclopedia biográfica en línea [Internet]. Barcelona, España, 2004. Disponible en [fecha de acceso: ].

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
(Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu; Skopje, actual Macedonia, 1910 - Calcuta, 1997) Religiosa albanesa nacionalizada india, premio Nobel de la Paz en 1979. Cuando en 1997 falleció la Madre Teresa de Calcuta, la congregación de las Misioneras de la Caridad contaba ya con más de quinientos centros en un centenar de países.

# data[].attributes.body
“A mind is like a parachute; it doesn’t work if it is not open” – Frank Zappa
We see better through an open window than a closed one…

# data[].attributes.body
“It is as noble to aim towards balance as towards perfection, since keeping balance is a perfection” – Jean Grenier.
A harmonious development of all aspects of the self is one of the common points of boundless wisdom…

# data[].attributes.body
“Fortune favours the brave” – Proverb
Put forward bold hypotheses, think outside the box, even if you’re not sure of being right…

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Este hombre es invitado a un programa de TV #12agosto

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
RESCATA A UN HUERFANO DESNUTRIDO AL BORDE DE LA MUERTE,UN AÑO DESPUES ES CASI IMPOSIBLE RECONOCERLO

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Dos tipos de héroes muy diferentes se encuentran cara a cara. Una conversación  muy importante!
Da "

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
John Thou a young beggar of Nairobi how he helps each other.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Garden of Praise: Malala Yousafzai Biography

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Biographies for children. Biography of Malala Yousafzai for elementry and middle school students. Fun online educational games and worksheets are provided free for each biography.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
stephanie and audrey<br> from forest hills

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Iqbal Masih was a brave advocate for child labor laws in Pakistan.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Louis Braille invented a system of writing and reading used by blind people all over the world.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (15 April 1452 - 2 May 1519) was an Italian polymath of the High Renaissance who was active as a painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect. While his fame initially rested on his achievements as a painter, he also became known for his notebooks, in which he made drawings and notes on a variety of subjects, including anatomy, astronomy, botany, cartography, painting, and paleontology. Leonardo is widely regarded to have been a genius who epitomized the Renaissance humanist ideal, and his collective works comprise a contribution to later generations of artists matched only by that of his younger contemporary, Michelangelo.

Born out of wedlock to a successful notary and a lower-class woman in, or near, Vinci, he was educated in Florence by the Italian painter and sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio. He began his career in the city, but then spent much time in the service of Ludovico Sforza in Milan. Later, he worked in Florence and Milan again, as well as briefly in Rome, all while attracting a large following of imitators and students. Upon the invitation of Francis I, he spent his last three years in France, where he died in 1519. Since his death, there has not been a time where his achievements, diverse interests, personal life, and empirical thinking have failed to incite interest and admiration, making him a frequent namesake and subject in culture.[vague ]

Leonardo is identified as one of the greatest painters in the history of art and is often credited as the founder of the High Renaissance. Despite having many lost works and fewer than 25 attributed major works-including numerous unfinished works-he created some of the most influential paintings in Western art. His magnum opus, the , is his best known work and often regarded as the world's most famous painting. The Last Supper is the most reproduced religious painting of all time and his Vitruvian Man drawing is also regarded as a cultural icon. In 2017, Salvator Mundi, attributed in whole or part to Leonardo, was sold at auction for US$450.3 million, setting a new record for the most expensive painting ever sold at public auction.

Revered for his technological ingenuity, he conceptualized flying machines, a type of armored fighting vehicle, concentrated solar power, a ratio machine that could be used in an adding machine, and the double hull. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or were even feasible during his lifetime, as the modern scientific approaches to metallurgy and engineering were only in their infancy during the Renaissance. Some of his smaller inventions, however, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire. He made substantial discoveries in anatomy, civil engineering, hydrodynamics, geology, optics, and tribology, but he did not publish his findings and they had little to no direct influence on subsequent science.

Early life (1452-1472)

Birth and background

Leonardo da Vinci, properly named Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (Leonardo, son of ser Piero from Vinci), was born on 15 April 1452 in, or close to, the Tuscan hill town of Vinci, 20 miles from Florence. He was born out of wedlock to Piero da Vinci (Ser Piero da Vinci d'Antonio di ser Piero di ser Guido; 1426-1504), a Florentine legal notary, and Caterina di Meo Lippi ( c. 1434 - 1494), from the lower-class. It remains uncertain where Leonardo was born; the traditional account, from a local oral tradition recorded by the historian Emanuele Repetti, is that he was born in Anchiano, a country hamlet that would have offered sufficient privacy for the illegitimate birth, though it is still possible he was born in a house in Florence that Ser Piero almost certainly had. Leonardo's parents both married separately the year after his birth. Caterina-who later appears in Leonardo's notes as only "Caterina" or "Catelina"-is usually identified as the Caterina Buti del Vacca who married the local artisan Antonio di Piero Buti del Vacca, nicknamed "L'Accattabriga" ("the quarrelsome one"). Other theories have been proposed, particularly that of art historian Martin Kemp, who suggested Caterina di Meo Lippi, an orphan who married purportedly with aid from Ser Piero and his family. Ser Piero married Albiera Amadori-having been betrothed to her the previous year-and after her death in 1464, went on to have three subsequent marriages. From all the marriages, Leonardo eventually had 16 half-siblings (of whom 11 survived infancy) who were much younger than he (the last was born when Leonardo was 46 years old) and with whom he had very little contact.

Very little is known about Leonardo's childhood and much is shrouded in myth, partially because of his biography in the frequently apocryphal Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550) by the 16th-century art historian Giorgio Vasari. Tax records indicate that by at least 1457 he lived in the household of his paternal grandfather, Antonio da Vinci, but it is possible that he spent the years before then in the care of his mother in Vinci, either Anchiano or Campo Zeppi in the parish of San Pantaleone. He is thought to have been close to his uncle, Francesco da Vinci, but his father was probably in Florence most of the time. Ser Piero, who was the descendant of a long line of notaries, established an official residence in Florence by at least 1469 and had a successful career. Despite his family history, Leonardo only received a basic and informal education in ( vernacular) writing, reading and mathematics, possibly because his artistic talents were recognised early, so his family decided to focus their attention there.

Later in life, Leonardo recorded his earliest memory, now in the Codex Atlanticus. While writing on the flight of birds, he recalled as an infant when a kite came to his cradle and opened his mouth with its tail; commentators still debate whether the anecdote was an actual memory or a fantasy.

Verrocchio's workshop

In the mid-1460s, Leonardo's family moved to Florence, which at the time was the centre of Christian Humanist thought and culture. Around the age of 14, he became a garzone (studio boy) in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, who was the leading Florentine painter and sculptor of his time. This was about the time of the death of Verrocchio's master, the great sculptor Donatello. Leonardo became an apprentice by the age of 17 and remained in training for seven years. Other famous painters apprenticed in the workshop or associated with it include Ghirlandaio, Perugino, Botticelli, and Lorenzo di Credi. Leonardo was exposed to both theoretical training and a wide range of technical skills, including drafting, chemistry, metallurgy, metal working, plaster casting, leather working, mechanics, and woodwork, as well as the artistic skills of drawing, painting, sculpting, and modelling.

Leonardo was a contemporary of Botticelli, Ghirlandaio and Perugino, who were all slightly older than he was. He would have met them at the workshop of Verrocchio or at the Platonic Academy of the Medici. Florence was ornamented by the works of artists such as Donatello's contemporaries Masaccio, whose figurative frescoes were imbued with realism and emotion, and Ghiberti, whose Gates of Paradise, gleaming with gold leaf, displayed the art of combining complex figure compositions with detailed architectural backgrounds. Piero della Francesca had made a detailed study of perspective, and was the first painter to make a scientific study of light. These studies and Leon Battista Alberti's treatise were to have a profound effect on younger artists and in particular on Leonardo's own observations and artworks.

Much of the painting in Verrocchio's workshop was done by his assistants. According to Vasari, Leonardo collaborated with Verrocchio on his The Baptism of Christ, painting the young angel holding Jesus' robe in a manner that was so far superior to his master's that Verrocchio put down his brush and never painted again, although this is believed to be an apocryphal story. Close examination reveals areas of the work that have been painted or touched-up over the tempera, using the new technique of oil paint, including the landscape, the rocks seen through the brown mountain stream, and much of the figure of Jesus, bearing witness to the hand of Leonardo. Leonardo may have been the model for two works by Verrocchio: the bronze statue of in the Bargello, and the Archangel Raphael in Tobias and the Angel.

Vasari tells a story of Leonardo as a very young man: a local peasant made himself a round shield and requested that Ser Piero have it painted for him. Leonardo, inspired by the story of Medusa, responded with a painting of a monster spitting fire that was so terrifying that his father bought a different shield to give to the peasant and sold Leonardo's to a Florentine art dealer for 100 ducats, who in turn sold it to the Duke of Milan.

First Florentine period (1472-c. 1482)

By 1472, at the age of 20, Leonardo qualified as a master in the Guild of Saint Luke, the guild of artists and doctors of medicine, but even after his father set him up in his own workshop, his attachment to Verrocchio was such that he continued to collaborate and live with him. Leonardo's earliest known dated work is a 1473 pen-and-ink drawing of the Arno valley (see below). According to Vasari, the young Leonardo was the first to suggest making the Arno river a navigable channel between Florence and Pisa.

In January 1478, Leonardo received an independent commission to paint an altarpiece for the Chapel of Saint Bernard in the Palazzo Vecchio, an indication of his independence from Verrocchio's studio. An anonymous early biographer, known as Anonimo Gaddiano, claims that in 1480 Leonardo was living with the Medici and often worked in the garden of the Piazza San Marco, Florence, where a Neoplatonic academy of artists, poets and philosophers organized by the Medici met. In March 1481, he received a commission from the monks of San Donato in Scopeto for The Adoration of the Magi. Neither of these initial commissions were completed, being abandoned when Leonardo went to offer his services to Duke of Milan Ludovico Sforza. Leonardo wrote Sforza a letter which described the diverse things that he could achieve in the fields of engineering and weapon design, and mentioned that he could paint. He brought with him a silver string instrument-either a lute or lyre -in the form of a horse's head.

With Alberti, Leonardo visited the home of the Medici and through them came to know the older Humanist philosophers of whom Marsiglio Ficino, proponent of Neoplatonism; Cristoforo Landino, writer of commentaries on Classical writings, and John Argyropoulos, teacher of Greek and translator of Aristotle were the foremost. Also associated with the Platonic Academy of the Medici was Leonardo's contemporary, the brilliant young poet and philosopher Pico della Mirandola. In 1482, Leonardo was sent as an ambassador by Lorenzo de' Medici to Ludovico il Moro, who ruled Milan between 1479 and 1499.

First Milanese period (c. 1482-1499)

Leonardo worked in Milan from 1482 until 1499. He was commissioned to paint the Virgin of the Rocks for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception and The Last Supper for the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie. In the spring of 1485, Leonardo travelled to Hungary (on behalf of Sforza) to meet king Matthias Corvinus, and was commissioned by him to paint a Madonna. In 1490 he was called as a consultant, together with Francesco di Giorgio Martini, for the building site of the cathedral of Pavia and was struck by the equestrian statue of Regisole, of which he left a sketch. Leonardo was employed on many other projects for Sforza, such as preparation of floats and pageants for special occasions; a drawing of, and wooden model for, a competition to design the cupola for Milan Cathedral; and a model for a huge equestrian monument to Ludovico's predecessor Francesco Sforza. This would have surpassed in size the only two large equestrian statues of the Renaissance, Donatello's Gattamelata in Padua and Verrocchio's Bartolomeo Colleoni in Venice, and became known as the Gran Cavallo. Leonardo completed a model for the horse and made detailed plans for its casting, but in November 1494, Ludovico gave the metal to his brother-in-law to be used for a cannon to defend the city from Charles VIII of France.

Contemporary correspondence records that Leonardo and his assistants were commissioned by the Duke of Milan to paint the Sala delle Asse in the Sforza Castle. The decoration was completed in 1498. The project became a trompe-l'œil decoration that made the great hall appear to be a pergola created by the interwoven limbs of sixteen mulberry trees, whose canopy included an intricate labyrinth of leaves and knots on the ceiling.

Second Florentine period (1500-1508)

When Ludovico Sforza was overthrown by France in 1500, Leonardo fled Milan for Venice, accompanied by his assistant Salaì and friend, the mathematician Luca Pacioli. In Venice, Leonardo was employed as a military architect and engineer, devising methods to defend the city from naval attack. On his return to Florence in 1500, he and his household were guests of the Servite monks at the monastery of Santissima Annunziata and were provided with a workshop where, according to Vasari, Leonardo created the cartoon of The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist, a work that won such admiration that "men [and] women, young and old" flocked to see it "as if they were going to a solemn festival."

In Cesena in 1502, Leonardo entered the service of Cesare Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI, acting as a military architect and engineer and travelling throughout Italy with his patron. Leonardo created a map of Cesare Borgia's stronghold, a town plan of Imola in order to win his patronage. Upon seeing it, Cesare hired Leonardo as his chief military engineer and architect. Later in the year, Leonardo produced another map for his patron, one of Chiana Valley, Tuscany, so as to give his patron a better overlay of the land and greater strategic position. He created this map in conjunction with his other project of constructing a dam from the sea to Florence, in order to allow a supply of water to sustain the canal during all seasons.

Leonardo had left Borgia's service and returned to Florence by early 1503, where he rejoined the Guild of Saint Luke on 18 October of that year. By this same month, Leonardo had begun working on a portrait of Lisa del Giocondo, the model for the , which he would continue working on until his twilight years. In January 1504, he was part of a committee formed to recommend where Michelangelo's statue of should be placed. He then spent two years in Florence designing and painting a mural of The Battle of Anghiari for the Signoria, with Michelangelo designing its companion piece, The Battle of Cascina.

In 1506, Leonardo was summoned to Milan by Charles II d'Amboise, the acting French governor of the city. There, Leonardo took on another pupil, Count Francesco Melzi, the son of a Lombard aristocrat, who is considered to have been his favourite student. The Council of Florence wished Leonardo to return promptly to finish The Battle of Anghiari, but he was given leave at the behest of Louis XII, who considered commissioning the artist to make some portraits. Leonardo may have commenced a project for an equestrian figure of d'Amboise; a wax model survives and, if genuine, is the only extant example of Leonardo's sculpture. Leonardo was otherwise free to pursue his scientific interests. Many of Leonardo's most prominent pupils either knew or worked with him in Milan, including Bernardino Luini, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, and Marco d'Oggiono. In 1507, Leonardo was in Florence sorting out a dispute with his brothers over the estate of his father, who had died in 1504.

Second Milanese period (1508-1513)

By 1508, Leonardo was back in Milan, living in his own house in Porta Orientale in the parish of Santa Babila.

In 1512, Leonardo was working on plans for an equestrian monument for Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, but this was prevented by an invasion of a confederation of Swiss, Spanish and Venetian forces, which drove the French from Milan. Leonardo stayed in the city, spending several months in 1513 at the Medici's Vaprio d'Adda villa.

Rome and France (1513-1519)

In March 1513, Lorenzo de' Medici's son Giovanni assumed the papacy (as Leo X); Leonardo went to Rome that September, where he was received by the pope's brother Giuliano. From September 1513 to 1516, Leonardo spent much of his time living in the Belvedere Courtyard in the Apostolic Palace, where Michelangelo and Raphael were both active. Leonardo was given an allowance of 33 ducats a month, and according to Vasari, decorated a lizard with scales dipped in quicksilver. The pope gave him a painting commission of unknown subject matter, but cancelled it when the artist set about developing a new kind of varnish. Leonardo became ill, in what may have been the first of multiple strokes leading to his death. He practiced botany in the Gardens of Vatican City, and was commissioned to make plans for the pope's proposed draining of the Pontine Marshes. He also dissected cadavers, making notes for a treatise on vocal cords; these he gave to an official in hopes of regaining the pope's favor, but was unsuccessful.

In October 1515, King Francis I of France recaptured Milan. Leonardo was present at the 19 December meeting of Francis I and Leo X, which took place in Bologna. In 1516, Leonardo entered Francis' service, being given the use of the manor house Clos Lucé, near the king's residence at the royal Château d'Amboise. Being frequently visited by Francis, he drew plans for an immense castle town the king intended to erect at Romorantin, and made a mechanical lion, which during a pageant walked toward the king and-upon being struck by a wand-opened its chest to reveal a cluster of lilies. Leonardo was accompanied during this time by his friend and apprentice Francesco Melzi, and supported by a pension totalling 10,000 scudi. At some point, Melzi drew a portrait of Leonardo; the only others known from his lifetime were a sketch by an unknown assistant on the back of one of Leonardo's studies (c.  1517) and a drawing by Giovanni Ambrogio Figino depicting an elderly Leonardo with his right arm wrapped in clothing. The latter, in addition to the record of an October 1517 visit by Louis d'Aragon, confirms an account of Leonardo's right hand being paralytic when he was 65, which may indicate why he left works such as the Mona Lisa unfinished. He continued to work at some capacity until eventually becoming ill and bedridden for several months.

Leonardo died at Clos Lucé on 2 May 1519 at the age of 67, possibly of a stroke. Francis I had become a close friend. Vasari describes Leonardo as lamenting on his deathbed, full of repentance, that "he had offended against God and men by failing to practice his art as he should have done." Vasari states that in his last days, Leonardo sent for a priest to make his confession and to receive the Holy Sacrament. Vasari also records that the king held Leonardo's head in his arms as he died, although this story may be legend rather than fact. In accordance with his will, sixty beggars carrying tapers followed Leonardo's casket. Melzi was the principal heir and executor, receiving, as well as money, Leonardo's paintings, tools, library and personal effects. Leonardo's other long-time pupil and companion, Salaì, and his servant Baptista de Vilanis, each received half of Leonardo's vineyards. His brothers received land, and his serving woman received a fur-lined cloak. On 12 August 1519, Leonardo's remains were interred in the Collegiate Church of Saint Florentin at the Château d'Amboise.

Salaì, or Il Salaino ("The Little Unclean One", i.e., the devil), entered Leonardo's household in 1490 as an assistant. After only a year, Leonardo made a list of his misdemeanours, calling him "a thief, a liar, stubborn, and a glutton," after he had made off with money and valuables on at least five occasions and spent a fortune on clothes. Nevertheless, Leonardo treated him with great indulgence, and he remained in Leonardo's household for the next thirty years. Salaì executed a number of paintings under the name of Andrea Salaì, but although Vasari claims that Leonardo "taught him many things about painting," his work is generally considered to be of less artistic merit than others among Leonardo's pupils, such as Marco d'Oggiono and Boltraffio.

Salaì owned the Mona Lisa at the time of Leonardo's death in 1524, and in his will it was assessed at 505 lire, an exceptionally high valuation for a small panel portrait. Some 20 years after Leonardo's death, Francis was reported by the goldsmith and sculptor Benvenuto Cellini as saying: "There had never been another man born in the world who knew as much as Leonardo, not so much about painting, sculpture and architecture, as that he was a very great philosopher."

Personal life

Despite the thousands of pages Leonardo left in notebooks and manuscripts, he scarcely made reference to his personal life.

Within Leonardo's lifetime, his extraordinary powers of invention, his "great physical beauty" and "infinite grace," as described by Vasari, as well as all other aspects of his life, attracted the curiosity of others. One such aspect was his love for animals, likely including vegetarianism and according to Vasari, a habit of purchasing caged birds and releasing them.

Leonardo had many friends who are now notable either in their fields or for their historical significance, including mathematician Luca Pacioli, with whom he collaborated on the book Divina proportione in the 1490s. Leonardo appears to have had no close relationships with women except for his friendship with Cecilia Gallerani and the two Este sisters, Beatrice and Isabella. While on a journey that took him through Mantua, he drew a portrait of Isabella that appears to have been used to create a painted portrait, now lost.

Beyond friendship, Leonardo kept his private life secret. His sexuality has been the subject of satire, analysis, and speculation. This trend began in the mid-16th century and was revived in the 19th and 20th centuries, most notably by Sigmund Freud in his Leonardo da Vinci, A Memory of His Childhood. Leonardo's most intimate relationships were perhaps with his pupils Salaì and Melzi. Melzi, writing to inform Leonardo's brothers of his death, described Leonardo's feelings for his pupils as both loving and passionate. It has been claimed since the 16th century that these relationships were of a sexual or erotic nature. Court records of 1476, when he was aged twenty-four, show that Leonardo and three other young men were charged with sodomy in an incident involving a well-known male prostitute. The charges were dismissed for lack of evidence, and there is speculation that since one of the accused, Lionardo de Tornabuoni, was related to Lorenzo de' Medici, the family exerted its influence to secure the dismissal. Since that date much has been written about his presumed homosexuality and its role in his art, particularly in the androgyny and eroticism manifested in Saint John the Baptist and and more explicitly in a number of erotic drawings.

Despite the recent awareness and admiration of Leonardo as a scientist and inventor, for the better part of four hundred years his fame rested on his achievements as a painter. A handful of works that are either authenticated or attributed to him have been regarded as among the great masterpieces. These paintings are famous for a variety of qualities that have been much imitated by students and discussed at great length by connoisseurs and critics. By the 1490s Leonardo had already been described as a "Divine" painter.

Among the qualities that make Leonardo's work unique are his innovative techniques for laying on the paint; his detailed knowledge of anatomy, light, botany and geology; his interest in physiognomy and the way humans register emotion in expression and gesture; his innovative use of the human form in figurative composition; and his use of subtle gradation of tone. All these qualities come together in his most famous painted works, the Mona Lisa, the Last Supper, and the Virgin of the Rocks.

Early works

Leonardo first gained attention for his work on the Baptism of Christ, painted in conjunction with Verrocchio. Two other paintings appear to date from his time at Verrocchio's workshop, both of which are Annunciations. One is small, 59 centimetres (23 in) long and 14 cm (5.5 in) high. It is a " predella" to go at the base of a larger composition, a painting by Lorenzo di Credi from which it has become separated. The other is a much larger work, 217 cm (85 in) long. In both Annunciations, Leonardo used a formal arrangement, like two well-known pictures by Fra Angelico of the same subject, of the Virgin Mary sitting or kneeling to the right of the picture, approached from the left by an angel in profile, with a rich flowing garment, raised wings and bearing a lily. Although previously attributed to Ghirlandaio, the larger work is now generally attributed to Leonardo.

In the smaller painting, Mary averts her eyes and folds her hands in a gesture that symbolised submission to God's will. Mary is not submissive, however, in the larger piece. The girl, interrupted in her reading by this unexpected messenger, puts a finger in her bible to mark the place and raises her hand in a formal gesture of greeting or surprise. This calm young woman appears to accept her role as the Mother of God, not with resignation but with confidence. In this painting, the young Leonardo presents the humanist face of the Virgin Mary, recognising humanity's role in God's incarnation.

Paintings of the 1480s

In the 1480s, Leonardo received two very important commissions and commenced another work that was of ground-breaking importance in terms of composition. Two of the three were never finished, and the third took so long that it was subject to lengthy negotiations over completion and payment.

One of these paintings was Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, which Bortolon associates with a difficult period of Leonardo's life, as evidenced in his diary: "I thought I was learning to live; I was only learning to die." Although the painting is barely begun, the composition can be seen and is very unusual. Jerome, as a penitent, occupies the middle of the picture, set on a slight diagonal and viewed somewhat from above. His kneeling form takes on a trapezoid shape, with one arm stretched to the outer edge of the painting and his gaze looking in the opposite direction. J. Wasserman points out the link between this painting and Leonardo's anatomical studies. Across the foreground sprawls his symbol, a great lion whose body and tail make a double spiral across the base of the picture space. The other remarkable feature is the sketchy landscape of craggy rocks against which the figure is silhouetted.

The daring display of figure composition, the landscape elements and personal drama also appear in the great unfinished masterpiece, the Adoration of the Magi, a commission from the Monks of San Donato a Scopeto. It is a complex composition, of about 250 x 250 centimetres. Leonardo did numerous drawings and preparatory studies, including a detailed one in linear perspective of the ruined classical architecture that forms part of the background. In 1482 Leonardo went to Milan at the behest of Lorenzo de' Medici in order to win favour with Ludovico il Moro, and the painting was abandoned.

The third important work of this period is the Virgin of the Rocks, commissioned in Milan for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception. The painting, to be done with the assistance of the de Predis brothers, was to fill a large complex altarpiece. Leonardo chose to paint an apocryphal moment of the infancy of Christ when the infant John the Baptist, in protection of an angel, met the Holy Family on the road to Egypt. The painting demonstrates an eerie beauty as the graceful figures kneel in adoration around the infant Christ in a wild landscape of tumbling rock and whirling water. While the painting is quite large, about 200×120 centimetres, it is not nearly as complex as the painting ordered by the monks of San Donato, having only four figures rather than about fifty and a rocky landscape rather than architectural details. The painting was eventually finished; in fact, two versions of the painting were finished: one remained at the chapel of the Confraternity, while Leonardo took the other to France. The Brothers did not get their painting, however, nor the de Predis their payment, until the next century.

Leonardo's most remarkable portrait of this period is the Lady with an Ermine, presumed to be Cecilia Gallerani ( c. 1483-1490), lover of Ludovico Sforza. The painting is characterised by the pose of the figure with the head turned at a very different angle to the torso, unusual at a date when many portraits were still rigidly in profile. The ermine plainly carries symbolic meaning, relating either to the sitter, or to Ludovico who belonged to the prestigious Order of the Ermine.

Paintings of the 1490s

Leonardo's most famous painting of the 1490s is The Last Supper, commissioned for the refectory of the Convent of Santa Maria della Grazie in Milan. It represents the last meal shared by Jesus with his disciples before his capture and death, and shows the moment when Jesus has just said "one of you will betray me", and the consternation that this statement caused.

The writer Matteo Bandello observed Leonardo at work and wrote that some days he would paint from dawn till dusk without stopping to eat and then not paint for three or four days at a time. This was beyond the comprehension of the prior of the convent, who hounded him until Leonardo asked Ludovico to intervene. Vasari describes how Leonardo, troubled over his ability to adequately depict the faces of Christ and the traitor Judas, told the duke that he might be obliged to use the prior as his model.

The painting was acclaimed as a masterpiece of design and characterization, but it deteriorated rapidly, so that within a hundred years it was described by one viewer as "completely ruined." Leonardo, instead of using the reliable technique of fresco, had used tempera over a ground that was mainly gesso, resulting in a surface subject to mould and to flaking. Despite this, the painting remains one of the most reproduced works of art; countless copies have been made in various mediums.

Toward the end of this period, in 1498 da Vinci's trompe-l'œil decoration of the Sala delle Asse was painted for the Duke of Milan in the Castello Sforzesco.

Paintings of the 1500s

In 1505, Leonardo was commissioned to paint The Battle of Anghiari in the Salone dei Cinquecento (Hall of the Five Hundred) in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. Leonardo devised a dynamic composition depicting four men riding raging war horses engaged in a battle for possession of a standard, at the Battle of Anghiari in 1440. Michelangelo was assigned the opposite wall to depict the Battle of Cascina. Leonardo's painting deteriorated rapidly and is now known from a copy by Rubens.

Among the works created by Leonardo in the 16th century is the small portrait known as the or La Gioconda, the laughing one. In the present era, it is arguably the most famous painting in the world. Its fame rests, in particular, on the elusive smile on the woman's face, its mysterious quality perhaps due to the subtly shadowed corners of the mouth and eyes such that the exact nature of the smile cannot be determined. The shadowy quality for which the work is renowned came to be called " sfumato", or Leonardo's smoke. Vasari wrote that the smile was "so pleasing that it seems more divine than human, and it was considered a wondrous thing that it was as lively as the smile of the living original."

Other characteristics of the painting are the unadorned dress, in which the eyes and hands have no competition from other details; the dramatic landscape background, in which the world seems to be in a state of flux; the subdued colouring; and the extremely smooth nature of the painterly technique, employing oils laid on much like tempera, and blended on the surface so that the brushstrokes are indistinguishable. Vasari expressed that the painting's quality would make even "the most confident master ... despair and lose heart." The perfect state of preservation and the fact that there is no sign of repair or overpainting is rare in a panel painting of this date.

In the painting Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, the composition again picks up the theme of figures in a landscape, which Wasserman describes as "breathtakingly beautiful" and harkens back to the Saint Jerome with the figure set at an oblique angle. What makes this painting unusual is that there are two obliquely set figures superimposed. Mary is seated on the knee of her mother, Saint Anne. She leans forward to restrain the Christ Child as he plays roughly with a lamb, the sign of his own impending sacrifice. This painting, which was copied many times, influenced Michelangelo, Raphael, and Andrea del Sarto, and through them Pontormo and Correggio. The trends in composition were adopted in particular by the Venetian painters Tintoretto and Veronese.

Leonardo was a prolific draughtsman, keeping journals full of small sketches and detailed drawings recording all manner of things that took his attention. As well as the journals there exist many studies for paintings, some of which can be identified as preparatory to particular works such as The Adoration of the Magi, The Virgin of the Rocks and The Last Supper. His earliest dated drawing is a Landscape of the Arno Valley, 1473, which shows the river, the mountains, Montelupo Castle and the farmlands beyond it in great detail.

Among his famous drawings are the Vitruvian Man, a study of the proportions of the human body; the Head of an Angel, for The Virgin of the Rocks in the Louvre; a botanical study of Star of Bethlehem; and a large drawing (160×100 cm) in black chalk on coloured paper of The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist in the National Gallery, London. This drawing employs the subtle technique of shading, in the manner of the Mona Lisa. It is thought that Leonardo never made a painting from it, the closest similarity being to The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne in the Louvre.

Other drawings of interest include numerous studies generally referred to as "caricatures" because, although exaggerated, they appear to be based upon observation of live models. Vasari relates that Leonardo would look for interesting faces in public to use as models for some of his work. There are numerous studies of beautiful young men, often associated with Salaì, with the rare and much admired facial feature, the so-called "Grecian profile". These faces are often contrasted with that of a warrior. Salaì is often depicted in fancy-dress costume. Leonardo is known to have designed sets for pageants with which these may be associated. Other, often meticulous, drawings show studies of drapery. A marked development in Leonardo's ability to draw drapery occurred in his early works. Another often-reproduced drawing is a macabre sketch that was done by Leonardo in Florence in 1479 showing the body of Bernardo Baroncelli, hanged in connection with the murder of Giuliano, brother of Lorenzo de' Medici, in the Pazzi conspiracy. In his notes, Leonardo recorded the colours of the robes that Baroncelli was wearing when he died.

Like the two contemporary architects Donato Bramante (who designed the Belvedere Courtyard) and Antonio da Sangallo the Elder, Leonardo experimented with designs for centrally planned churches, a number of which appear in his journals, as both plans and views, although none was ever realised.

Journals and notes

Renaissance humanism recognised no mutually exclusive polarities between the sciences and the arts, and Leonardo's studies in science and engineering are sometimes considered as impressive and innovative as his artistic work. These studies were recorded in 13,000 pages of notes and drawings, which fuse art and natural philosophy (the forerunner of modern science). They were made and maintained daily throughout Leonardo's life and travels, as he made continual observations of the world around him. Leonardo's notes and drawings display an enormous range of interests and preoccupations, some as mundane as lists of groceries and people who owed him money and some as intriguing as designs for wings and shoes for walking on water. There are compositions for paintings, studies of details and drapery, studies of faces and emotions, of animals, babies, dissections, plant studies, rock formations, whirlpools, war machines, flying machines and architecture.

These notebooks-originally loose papers of different types and sizes-were largely entrusted to Leonardo's pupil and heir Francesco Melzi after the master's death. These were to be published, a task of overwhelming difficulty because of its scope and Leonardo's idiosyncratic writing. Some of Leonardo's drawings were copied by an anonymous Milanese artist for a planned treatise on art c. 1570. After Melzi's death in 1570, the collection passed to his son, the lawyer Orazio, who initially took little interest in the journals. In 1587, a Melzi household tutor named Lelio Gavardi took 13 of the manuscripts to Pisa; there, the architect Giovanni Magenta reproached Gavardi for having taken the manuscripts illicitly and returned them to Orazio. Having many more such works in his possession, Orazio gifted the volumes to Magenta. News spread of these lost works of Leonardo's, and Orazio retrieved seven of the 13 manuscripts, which he then gave to Pompeo Leoni for publication in two volumes; one of these was the Codex Atlanticus. The other six works had been distributed to a few others. After Orazio's death, his heirs sold the rest of Leonardo's possessions, and thus began their dispersal.

Some works have found their way into major collections such as the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, the Louvre, the Biblioteca Nacional de España, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, which holds the 12-volume Codex Atlanticus, and the British Library in London, which has put a selection from the Codex Arundel (BL Arundel MS 263) online. Works have also been at Holkham Hall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in the private hands of John Nicholas Brown I and Robert Lehman. The Codex Leicester is the only privately owned major scientific work of Leonardo; it is owned by Bill Gates and displayed once a year in different cities around the world.

Most of Leonardo's writings are in mirror-image cursive. Since Leonardo wrote with his left hand, it was probably easier for him to write from right to left. Leonardo used a variety of shorthand and symbols, and states in his notes that he intended to prepare them for publication. In many cases a single topic is covered in detail in both words and pictures on a single sheet, together conveying information that would not be lost if the pages were published out of order. Why they were not published during Leonardo's lifetime is unknown.

Science and inventions

Leonardo's approach to science was observational: he tried to understand a phenomenon by describing and depicting it in utmost detail and did not emphasise experiments or theoretical explanation. Since he lacked formal education in Latin and mathematics, contemporary scholars mostly ignored Leonardo the scientist, although he did teach himself Latin. His keen observations in many areas were noted, such as when he wrote "Il sole non si move." ("The Sun does not move.")

In the 1490s he studied mathematics under Luca Pacioli and prepared a series of drawings of regular solids in a skeletal form to be engraved as plates for Pacioli's book Divina proportione, published in 1509. While living in Milan, he studied light from the summit of Monte Rosa. Scientific writings in his notebook on fossils have been considered as influential on early palaeontology.

The content of his journals suggest that he was planning a series of treatises on a variety of subjects. A coherent treatise on anatomy is said to have been observed during a visit by Cardinal Louis d'Aragon's secretary in 1517. Aspects of his work on the studies of anatomy, light and the landscape were assembled for publication by Melzi and eventually published as A Treatise on Painting in France and Italy in 1651 and Germany in 1724, with engravings based upon drawings by the Classical painter Nicolas Poussin. According to Arasse, the treatise, which in France went into 62 editions in fifty years, caused Leonardo to be seen as "the precursor of French academic thought on art."

While Leonardo's experimentation followed scientific methods, a recent and exhaustive analysis of Leonardo as a scientist by Fritjof Capra argues that Leonardo was a fundamentally different kind of scientist from Galileo, Newton and other scientists who followed him in that, as a " Renaissance Man", his theorising and hypothesising integrated the arts and particularly painting.

Anatomy and physiology

Leonardo started his study in the anatomy of the human body under the apprenticeship of Verrocchio, who demanded that his students develop a deep knowledge of the subject. As an artist, he quickly became master of topographic anatomy, drawing many studies of muscles, tendons and other visible anatomical features.[citation needed ]

As a successful artist, Leonardo was given permission to dissect human corpses at the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence and later at hospitals in Milan and Rome. From 1510 to 1511 he collaborated in his studies with the doctor Marcantonio della Torre, professor of Anatomy at the University of Pavia. Leonardo made over 240 detailed drawings and wrote about 13,000 words toward a treatise on anatomy. Only a small amount of the material on anatomy was published in Leonardo's Treatise on painting. During the time that Melzi was ordering the material into chapters for publication, they were examined by a number of anatomists and artists, including Vasari, Cellini and Albrecht Dürer, who made a number of drawings from them.

Leonardo's anatomical drawings include many studies of the human skeleton and its parts, and of muscles and sinews. He studied the mechanical functions of the skeleton and the muscular forces that are applied to it in a manner that prefigured the modern science of biomechanics. He drew the heart and vascular system, the sex organs and other internal organs, making one of the first scientific drawings of a fetus in utero. The drawings and notation are far ahead of their time, and if published would undoubtedly have made a major contribution to medical science.

Leonardo also closely observed and recorded the effects of age and of human emotion on the physiology, studying in particular the effects of rage. He drew many figures who had significant facial deformities or signs of illness. Leonardo also studied and drew the anatomy of many animals, dissecting cows, birds, monkeys, bears, and frogs, and comparing in his drawings their anatomical structure with that of humans. He also made a number of studies of horses.

Leonardo's dissections and documentation of muscles, nerves, and vessels helped to describe the physiology and mechanics of movement. He attempted to identify the source of 'emotions' and their expression. He found it difficult to incorporate the prevailing system and theories of bodily humours, but eventually he abandoned these physiological explanations of bodily functions. He made the observations that humours were not located in cerebral spaces or ventricles. He documented that the humours were not contained in the heart or the liver, and that it was the heart that defined the circulatory system. He was the first to define atherosclerosis and liver cirrhosis. He created models of the cerebral ventricles with the use of melted wax and constructed a glass aorta to observe the circulation of blood through the aortic valve by using water and grass seed to watch flow patterns.

Engineering and inventions

During his lifetime, Leonardo was also valued as an engineer. With the same rational and analytical approach that moved him to represent the human body and to investigate anatomy, Leonardo studied and designed many machines and devices. He drew their "anatomy" with unparalleled mastery, producing the first form of the modern technical drawing, including a perfected "exploded view" technique, to represent internal components. Those studies and projects collected in his codices fill more than 5,000 pages. In a letter of 1482 to the lord of Milan Ludovico il Moro, he wrote that he could create all sorts of machines both for the protection of a city and for siege. When he fled from Milan to Venice in 1499, he found employment as an engineer and devised a system of moveable barricades to protect the city from attack. In 1502, he created a scheme for diverting the flow of the Arno river, a project on which Niccolò Machiavelli also worked. He continued to contemplate the canalization of Lombardy's plains while in Louis XII's company and of the Loire and its tributaries in the company of Francis I. Leonardo's journals include a vast number of inventions, both practical and impractical. They include musical instruments, a mechanical knight, hydraulic pumps, reversible crank mechanisms, finned mortar shells, and a steam cannon.

Leonardo was fascinated by the phenomenon of flight for much of his life, producing many studies, including Codex on the Flight of Birds ( c. 1505), as well as plans for several flying machines, such as a flapping ornithopter and a machine with a helical rotor. A 2003 documentary by British television station Channel Four, titled Leonardo's Dream Machines, various designs by Leonardo, such as a parachute and a giant crossbow, were interpreted and constructed. Some of those designs proved successful, whilst others fared less well when tested. Similarly, a team of engineers built ten machines designed by Da Vinci in the 2009 American television series Doing DaVinci, including a fighting vehicle and a self-propelled cart.

Research performed by Marc van den Broek revealed older prototypes for more than 100 inventions that are ascribed to Leonardo. Similarities between Leonardo's illustrations and drawings from the Middle Ages and from Ancient Greece and Rome, the Chinese and Persian Empires, and Egypt suggest that a large portion of Leonardo's inventions had been conceived before his lifetime. Leonardo's innovation was to combine different functions from existing drafts and set them into scenes that illustrated their utility. By reconstituting technical inventions he created something new.

In his notebooks, Leonardo first stated the 'laws' of sliding friction in 1493. His inspiration for investigating friction came about in part from his study of perpetual motion, which he correctly concluded was not possible. His results were never published and the friction laws were not rediscovered until 1699 by Guillaume Amontons, with whose name they are now usually associated. For this contribution, Leonardo was named as the first of the 23 "Men of Tribology" by Duncan Dowson.

Although he had no formal academic training, many historians and scholars regard Leonardo as the prime exemplar of the " Universal Genius" or "Renaissance Man", an individual of "unquenchable curiosity" and "feverishly inventive imagination." He is widely considered one of the most diversely talented individuals ever to have lived. According to art historian Helen Gardner, the scope and depth of his interests were without precedent in recorded history, and "his mind and personality seem to us superhuman, while the man himself mysterious and remote." Scholars interpret his view of the world as being based in logic, though the empirical methods he used were unorthodox for his time.

Leonardo's fame within his own lifetime was such that the King of France carried him away like a trophy, and was claimed to have supported him in his old age and held him in his arms as he died. Interest in Leonardo and his work has never diminished. Crowds still queue to see his best-known artworks, T-shirts still bear his most famous drawing, and writers continue to hail him as a genius while speculating about his private life, as well as about what one so intelligent actually believed in.

The continued admiration that Leonardo commanded from painters, critics and historians is reflected in many other written tributes. Baldassare Castiglione, author of Il Cortegiano ( The Courtier), wrote in 1528: "...Another of the greatest painters in this world looks down on this art in which he is unequalled..." while the biographer known as "Anonimo Gaddiano" wrote, c.  1540: "His genius was so rare and universal that it can be said that nature worked a miracle on his behalf..." Vasari, in his Lives of the Artists (1568), opens his chapter on Leonardo:

In the normal course of events many men and women are born with remarkable talents; but occasionally, in a way that transcends nature, a single person is marvellously endowed by Heaven with beauty, grace and talent in such abundance that he leaves other men far behind, all his actions seem inspired and indeed everything he does clearly comes from God rather than from human skill. Everyone acknowledged that this was true of Leonardo da Vinci, an artist of outstanding physical beauty, who displayed infinite grace in everything that he did and who cultivated his genius so brilliantly that all problems he studied he solved with ease.

The 19th century brought a particular admiration for Leonardo's genius, causing Henry Fuseli to write in 1801: "Such was the dawn of modern art, when Leonardo da Vinci broke forth with a splendour that distanced former excellence: made up of all the elements that constitute the essence of genius..." This is echoed by A.E. Rio who wrote in 1861: "He towered above all other artists through the strength and the nobility of his talents."

By the 19th century, the scope of Leonardo's notebooks was known, as well as his paintings. Hippolyte Taine wrote in 1866: "There may not be in the world an example of another genius so universal, so incapable of fulfilment, so full of yearning for the infinite, so naturally refined, so far ahead of his own century and the following centuries." Art historian Bernard Berenson wrote in 1896: "Leonardo is the one artist of whom it may be said with perfect literalness: Nothing that he touched but turned into a thing of eternal beauty. Whether it be the cross section of a skull, the structure of a weed, or a study of muscles, he, with his feeling for line and for light and shade, forever transmuted it into life-communicating values."

The interest in Leonardo's genius has continued unabated; experts study and translate his writings, analyse his paintings using scientific techniques, argue over attributions and search for works which have been recorded but never found. Liana Bortolon, writing in 1967, said: "Because of the multiplicity of interests that spurred him to pursue every field of knowledge...Leonardo can be considered, quite rightly, to have been the universal genius par excellence, and with all the disquieting overtones inherent in that term. Man is as uncomfortable today, faced with a genius, as he was in the 16th century. Five centuries have passed, yet we still view Leonardo with awe." The Elmer Belt Library of Vinciana is a special collection at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Twenty-first-century author Walter Isaacson based much of his biography of Leonardo on thousands of notebook entries, studying the personal notes, sketches, budget notations, and musings of the man whom he considers the greatest of innovators. Isaacson was surprised to discover a "fun, joyous" side of Leonardo in addition to his limitless curiosity and creative genius.

On the 500th anniversary of Leonardo's death, the Louvre in Paris arranged for the largest ever single exhibit of his work, called Leonardo, between November 2019 and February 2020. The exhibit includes over 100 paintings, drawings and notebooks. Eleven of the paintings that Leonardo completed in his lifetime were included. Five of these are owned by the Louvre, but the Mona Lisa was not included because it is in such great demand among general visitors to the Louvre; it remains on display in its gallery. Vitruvian Man, however, is on display following a legal battle with its owner, the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice. Salvator Mundi was also not included because its Saudi owner did not agree to lease the work.

The Mona Lisa, considered Leonardo's magnum opus, is often regarded as the most famous portrait ever made. The Last Supper is the most reproduced religious painting of all time, and Leonardo's Vitruvian Man drawing is also considered a cultural icon.

More than a decade of analysis of Leonardo's genetic genealogy, conducted by Alessandro Vezzosi and Agnese Sabato, came to a conclusion in mid-2021. It was determined that the artist has 14 living male relatives. The work could also help determine the authenticity of remains thought to belong to Leonardo.

Location of remains

While Leonardo was certainly buried in the collegiate church of Saint Florentin at the Château d'Amboise in 12 August 1519, the current location of his remains is unclear. Much of Château d'Amboise was damaged during the French Revolution, leading to the church's demolition in 1802. Some of the graves were destroyed in the process, scattering the bones interred there and thereby leaving the whereabouts of Leonardo's remains subject to dispute; a gardener may have even buried some in the corner of the courtyard.

In 1863, fine-arts inspector general Arsène Houssaye received an imperial commission to excavate the site and discovered a partially complete skeleton with a bronze ring on one finger, white hair, and stone fragments bearing the inscriptions "EO", "AR", "DUS", and "VINC"-interpreted as forming "Leonardus Vinci". The skull's eight teeth corresponds to someone of approximately the appropriate age and a silver shield found near the bones depicts a beardless Francis I, corresponding to the king's appearance during Leonardo's time in France.

Houssaye postulated that the unusually large skull was an indicator of Leonardo's intelligence; author Charles Nicholl describes this as a "dubious phrenological deduction". At the same time, Houssaye noted some issues with his observations, including that the feet were turned toward the high altar, a practice generally reserved for laymen, and that the skeleton of 1.73 metres (5.7 ft) seemed too short.[failed verification - see discussion] Art historian Mary Margaret Heaton wrote in 1874 that the height would be appropriate for Leonardo. The skull was allegedly presented to Napoleon III before being returned to the Château d'Amboise, where they were re-interred in the chapel of Saint Hubert in 1874. A plaque above the tomb states that its contents are only presumed to be those of Leonardo.

It has since been theorized that the folding of the skeleton's right arm over the head may correspond to the paralysis of Leonardo's right hand. In 2016, it was announced that DNA tests would be conducted to determine whether the attribution is correct. The DNA of the remains will be compared to that of samples collected from Leonardo's work and his half-brother Domenico's descendants; it may also be sequenced.

In 2019, documents were published revealing that Houssaye had kept the ring and a lock of hair. In 1925, his great-grandson sold these to an American collector. Sixty years later, another American acquired them, leading to them being displayed at the Leonardo Museum in Vinci beginning on 2 May 2019, the 500th anniversary of the artist's death.

General

1. See Nicholl (2005, pp. 17-20) and Bambach (2019, p. 24) for further information on the dispute and uncertainty surrounding Leonardo's exact birthplace.

2. ; LEE-ə-NAR-doh də VIN-chee, LEE-oh-, LAY-oh-

3. (^ Italian: [leoˈnardo di ˈsɛr ˈpjɛːro da (v)ˈvintʃi] listen ) The inclusion of the title 'ser' (shortening of Italian Messer or Messere, title of courtesy prefixed to the first name) indicates that Leonardo's father was a gentleman.

4. The diary of his paternal grandfather Ser Antonio relays a precise account: "There was born to me a grandson, son of [ [^ Ser Piero fr], on 15 April, a Saturday, at the third hour of the night." Ser Antonio records Leonardo being baptized the following day by Piero di Bartolomeo at the parish of Santa Croce it].

5. It has been suggested that Caterina may have been a slave from the Middle East "or at least, from the Mediterranean" or even of Chinese descent. According to art critic ^ Alessandro Vezzosi, head of the Leonardo Museum in Vinci, there is evidence that Piero owned a slave called Caterina.[19] The reconstruction of one of Leonardo's fingerprints shows a pattern that matches 60% of people of Middle Eastern origin, suggesting the possibility that Leonardo may have had Middle Eastern blood. The claim is refuted by Simon Cole, associate professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California at Irvine: "You can't predict one person's race from these kinds of incidences, especially if looking at only one finger". More recently, historian Martin Kemp, after digging through overlooked archives and records in Italy, found evidence that Leonardo's mother was a young local woman identified as Caterina di Meo Lippi.[20]

6. ^ He also never wrote about his father, except a passing note of his death in which he overstates his age by three years. Leonardo's siblings caused him difficulty after his father's death in a dispute over their inheritance.

7. The humanist influence of Donatello's ^ David can be seen in Leonardo's late paintings, particularly John the Baptist.

8. The "diverse arts" and technical skills of Medieval and Renaissance workshops are described in detail in the 12th-century text ^ On Divers Arts by Theophilus Presbyter and in the early 15th-century text Il Libro Dell'arte O Trattato Della Pittui by Cennino Cennini.

9. ^ On the back he wrote: "I, staying with Anthony, am happy," possibly in reference to his father.

10. Both works are lost. The entire composition of Michelangelo's painting is known from a copy by Aristotole da Sangallo, 1542.^ [67] Leonardo's painting is known only from preparatory sketches and several copies of the centre section, of which the best known, and probably least accurate, is by Peter Paul Rubens.

11. It is unknown for what occasion the mechanical lion was made, but it is believed to have greeted the king at his entry into ^ Lyon and perhaps was used for the peace talks between the French king and Pope Leo X in Bologna. A conjectural recreation of the lion has been made and is on display in the Museum of Bologna.[80]

12. Identified via its similarity to Leonardo's ^ presumed self-portrait[83]

13. "... Messer Lunardo Vinci [^ sic] ... an old graybeard of more than 70 years ... showed His Excellency three pictures ... from whom, since he was then subject to a certain paralysis of the right hand, one could not expect any more good work."

14. This scene is portrayed in romantic paintings by ^ Ingres, Ménageot and other French artists, as well as Angelica Kauffman.

15. On the day of Leonardo's death, a royal edict was issued by the king at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, a two-day journey from Clos Lucé. This has been taken as evidence that King Francis cannot have been present at Leonardo's deathbed, but the edict was not signed by the king.[91]

16. The painting, which in the 18th century belonged to ^ Angelica Kauffman, was later cut up. The two main sections were found in a junk shop and cobbler's shop and were reunited. It is probable that outer parts of the composition are missing.

17. He also drew with his left hand, his ^ hatch strokes "slanting down from left to right-the natural stroke of a left-handed artist". He also sometimes wrote conventionally with his right hand.[134]

18. ^ Salvator Mundi, a painting by Leonardo depicting Jesus holding an orb, sold for a world record US$450.3 million at a Christie's auction in New York, 15 November 2017.[168] The highest known sale price for any artwork was previously US$300 million, for Willem de Kooning's Interchange, which was sold privately in September 2015.[169] The highest price previously paid for a work of art at auction was for Pablo Picasso's Les Femmes d'Alger, which sold for US$179.4 million in May 2015 at Christie's New York.[169]

Dates of works

References

Early

Modern

Works cited

Books

Arasse, Daniel [in French] (1998). Leonardo da Vinci. Old Saybrook: Konecky & Konecky. ISBN 978-1-56852-198-5.

Bortolon, Liana (1967). The Life and Times of Leonardo. London: Paul Hamlyn.

Clark, Kenneth (1961). Leonardo da Vinci. City of Westminster: Penguin Books. OCLC 187223.

Gasca, Ana Millàn; Nicolò, Fernando; Lucertini, Mario (2004). Technological Concepts and Mathematical Models in the Evolution of Modern Engineering Systems. Birkhauser. ISBN 978-3-7643-6940-8.

Heaton, Mary Margaret (1874). Leonardo Da Vinci and His Works: Consisting of a Life of Leonardo Da Vinci. New York: Macmillan Publishers. OCLC 1706262.

Martindale, Andrew (1972). . Thames and Hudson. ISBN 978-0-500-56006-8.

O'Malley, Charles D.; Sounders, J.B. de C.M. (1952). Leonardo on the Human Body: The Anatomical, Physiological, and Embryological Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. With Translations, Emendations and a Biographical Introduction. New York: Henry Schuman.

Pedretti, Carlo (1982). Leonardo, a study in chronology and style. Cambridge: Johnson Reprint Corp. ISBN 978-0-384-45281-7.

Popham, A.E. (1946). The Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci. Jonathan Cape. ISBN 978-0-224-60462-8.

Richter, Jean Paul (1970). The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. Dover. ISBN 978-0-486-22572-2. volume 2: ISBN 0-486-22573-9. A reprint of the original 1883 edition

Wallace, Robert (1972) [1966]. The World of Leonardo: 1452-1519. New York: Time-Life Books.

Williamson, Hugh Ross (1974). Lorenzo the Magnificent. Michael Joseph. ISBN 978-0-7181-1204-2.

Vezzosi, Alessandro (1997). Leonardo da Vinci: Renaissance Man. 'New Horizons' series. Translated by Bonfante-Warren, Alexandra (English translation ed.). London: Thames & Hudson. ISBN 978-0-500-30081-7.

Journals and encyclopedia articles

Further reading

See Kemp (2003) and Bambach (2019, pp. 442-579) for extensive bibliographies

External links

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (15 April 1452 - 2 May 1519) was an Italian polymath of the High Renaissance who was active as a painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Kids learn about the biography of Marie Curie, woman scientist who worked on radioactivity and won two Nobel prizes for science.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Jacques-Yves Cousteau, (, also , French: [ʒak iv kusto]; 11 June 1910 - 25 June 1997) was a French naval officer, oceanographer, filmmaker and author. He co-invented the first successful Aqua-Lung, open-circuit SCUBA ( self-contained underwater breathing apparatus). The apparatus assisted him in producing some of the first underwater documentaries.

Cousteau wrote many books describing his undersea explorations. In his first book, The Silent World: A Story of Undersea Discovery and Adventure, Cousteau surmised the existence of the echolocation abilities of porpoises. The book was adapted into an underwater documentary called The Silent World. Co-directed by Cousteau and Louis Malle, it was one of the first films to use underwater cinematography to document the ocean depths in color. The film won the 1956 Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and remained the only documentary to do so until 2004, when Fahrenheit 9/11 received the award. It was also awarded the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1957.

From 1966 to 1976, he hosted The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, a documentary television series, presented on American commercial television stations. A second documentary series, The Cousteau Odyssey, ran from 1977 to 1982 on public television stations.

"The sea, the great unifier, is man's only hope. Now, as never before,
the old phrase has a literal meaning: We are all in the same boat."

Jacques Cousteau

Cousteau was born on 11 June 1910, in Saint-André-de-Cubzac, Gironde, France, to Daniel and Élisabeth Cousteau. He had one brother, Pierre-Antoine. Cousteau completed his preparatory studies at the Collège Stanislas in Paris. In 1930, he entered the École navale and graduated as a gunnery officer. However, an automobile accident, which broke both his arms, cut short his career in naval aviation. The accident forced Cousteau to change his plans to become a naval pilot, so he then indulged his passion for the ocean.

In Toulon, where he was serving on the , Cousteau carried out his first underwater experiments, thanks to his friend Philippe Tailliez who in 1936 lent him some Fernez underwater goggles, predecessors of modern swimming goggles. Cousteau also belonged to the information service of the French Navy, and was sent on missions to Shanghai and Japan (1935-1938) and in the USSR (1939).

On 12 July 1937, he married Simone Melchior, his business partner, with whom he had two sons, Jean-Michel (born 1938) and Philippe (1940-1979). His sons took part in the adventures of the . In 1991, six months after his wife Simone's death from cancer, he married Francine Triplet. They already had a daughter Diane Cousteau (born 1980) and a son, Pierre-Yves Cousteau (born 1982, during Cousteau's marriage to his first wife).

The years of World War II were decisive for the history of diving. After the armistice of 1940, the family of Simone and Jacques-Yves Cousteau took refuge in Megève, where he became a friend of the Ichac family who also lived there. Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Marcel Ichac shared the same desire to reveal to the general public unknown and inaccessible places - for Cousteau the underwater world and for Ichac the high mountains. The two neighbors took the first ex-aequo prize of the Congress of Documentary Film in 1943, for the first French underwater film: Par dix-huit mètres de fond ( 18 meters deep), made without breathing apparatus the previous year in the Embiez islands in Var, with Philippe Tailliez and Frédéric Dumas, using a depth-pressure-proof camera case developed by mechanical engineer Léon Vèche, an engineer of Arts and Measures at the Naval College.

In 1943, they made the film Épaves ( Shipwrecks), in which they used two of the very first Aqua-Lung prototypes. These prototypes were made in Boulogne-Billancourt by the Air Liquide company, following instructions from Cousteau and Émile Gagnan. When making Épaves, Cousteau could not find the necessary blank reels of movie film, but had to buy hundreds of small still camera film reels the same width, intended for a make of child's camera, and cemented them together to make long reels.

Having kept bonds with the English speakers (he spent part of his childhood in the United States and usually spoke English) and with French soldiers in North Africa (under Admiral Lemonnier), Jacques-Yves Cousteau (whose villa "Baobab" at Sanary ( Var) was opposite Admiral Darlan's villa "Reine"), helped the French Navy to join again with the Allies; he assembled a commando operation against the Italian espionage services in France, and received several military decorations for his deeds. At that time, he kept his distance from his brother Pierre-Antoine Cousteau, a "pen anti-semite" who wrote the collaborationist newspaper Je suis partout ( I am everywhere) and who received the death sentence in 1946. However, this was later commuted to a life sentence, and Pierre-Antoine was released in 1954.

During the 1940s, Cousteau is credited with improving the Aqua-Lung design which gave birth to the open-circuit scuba technology used today. According to his first book, The Silent World: A Story of Undersea Discovery and Adventure (1953), Cousteau started diving with Fernez goggles in 1936, and in 1939 used the self-contained underwater breathing apparatus invented in 1926 by Commander Yves le Prieur. Cousteau was not satisfied with the length of time he could spend underwater with the Le Prieur apparatus so he improved it to extend underwater duration by adding a demand regulator, invented in 1942 by Émile Gagnan. In 1943 Cousteau tried out the first prototype Aqua-Lung which finally made extended underwater exploration possible.

Late 1940s: GERS and Élie Monnier

In 1946, Cousteau and Tailliez showed the film Épaves ("Shipwrecks") to Admiral Lemonnier, who gave them the responsibility of setting up the Groupement de Recherches Sous-marines (GRS) (Underwater Research Group) of the French Navy in Toulon. A little later it became the GERS (Groupe d'Études et de Recherches Sous-Marines, = Underwater Studies and Research Group), then the COMISMER ("COMmandement des Interventions Sous la MER", = "Undersea Interventions Command"), and finally more recently the CEPHISMER. In 1947, Chief Petty Officer Maurice Fargues became the first diver to die using an aqualung, while attempting a new depth record with the GERS near Toulon.

In 1948, between missions of mine clearance, underwater exploration and technological and physiological tests, Cousteau undertook a first campaign in the Mediterranean on board the sloop Élie Monnier, with Philippe Tailliez, Frédéric Dumas, Jean Alinat and the scenario writer Marcel Ichac. The small team also undertook the exploration of the Roman wreck of Mahdia (Tunisia). It was the first underwater archaeology operation using autonomous diving, opening the way for scientific underwater archaeology. Cousteau and Marcel Ichac brought back from there the Carnets diving film (presented and preceded with the Cannes Film Festival 1951).

Cousteau and the Élie Monnier then took part in the rescue of Professor Jacques Piccard's bathyscaphe, the FNRS-2, during the 1949 expedition to Dakar. Thanks to this rescue, the French Navy was able to reuse the sphere of the bathyscaphe to construct the FNRS-3.

The adventures of this period are told in the two books The Silent World (1953, by Cousteau and Dumas) and Plongées sans câble (1954, by Philippe Tailliez).

1950-1970s

In 1949, Cousteau left the French Navy.

In 1950, he founded the French Oceanographic Campaigns (FOC), and leased a ship called Calypso from Thomas Loel Guinness for a symbolic one franc a year. Cousteau refitted the Calypso as a mobile laboratory for field research and as his principal vessel for diving and filming. He also carried out underwater archaeological excavations in the Mediterranean, in particular at Grand-Congloué (1952).

With the publication of his first book in 1953, The Silent World, Cousteau correctly predicted the existence of the echolocation abilities of porpoises. He reported that his research vessel, the Élie Monier, was heading to the Straits of Gibraltar and noticed a group of porpoises following them. Cousteau changed course a few degrees off the optimal course to the center of the strait, and the porpoises followed for a few minutes, then diverged toward mid-channel again. It was evident that they knew where the optimal course lay, even if the humans did not. Cousteau concluded that the cetaceans had something like sonar, which was a relatively new feature on submarines.

In 1954, Cousteau conducted a survey of Abu Dhabi waters on behalf of British Petroleum. Among those accompanying him was Louis Malle who made a black-and-white film of the expedition for the company. Cousteau won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1956 for The Silent World co-produced with Malle. In 1957, Cousteau took over as leader of the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco. Afterward, with the assistance of Jean Mollard, he made a "diving saucer" SP-350, an experimental underwater vehicle which could reach a depth of 350 meters. The successful experiment was quickly repeated in 1965 with two vehicles which reached 500 meters.

In 1957, he was elected as director of the Oceanographical Museum of Monaco. He directed Précontinent, about the experiments of diving in saturation (long-duration immersion, houses under the sea), and was admitted to the United States National Academy of Sciences.

He was involved in the creation of Confédération Mondiale des Activités Subaquatiques and served as its inaugural president from 1959 to 1973.

Cousteau also took part in inventing the "SP-350 Denise Diving Saucer" in 1959 which was an invention best for exploring the ocean floor, as it allowed one to explore on solid ground.

In October 1960, a large amount of radioactive waste was going to be discarded in the Mediterranean Sea by the Commissariat à l'énergie atomique (CEA). The CEA argued that the dumps were experimental in nature, and that French oceanographers such as Vsevelod Romanovsky had recommended it. Romanovsky and other French scientists, including Louis Fage and Jacques Cousteau, repudiated the claim, saying that Romanovsky had in mind a much smaller amount. The CEA claimed that there was little circulation (and hence little need for concern) at the dump site between Nice and Corsica, but French public opinion sided with the oceanographers rather than with the CEA atomic energy scientists. The CEA chief, Francis Perrin, decided to postpone the dump. Cousteau organized a publicity campaign which in less than two weeks gained wide popular support. The train carrying the waste was stopped by women and children sitting on the railway tracks, and it was sent back to its origin.

In the 1960s, Cousteau was involved with a set of three projects to build underwater "villages"; the projects were named Precontinent I, Precontinent II and Precontinent III. Each ensuing project was aimed at increasing the depth at which people continuously lived under water, and were an attempt at creating an environment in which men could live and work on the sea floor. The projects are best known as Conshelf I (1962), Conshelf II (1963), and Conshelf III (1965). The names "Precontinent", and "Continental Shelf Station" (Conshelf) were used interchangeably by Cousteau.

A meeting with American television companies ( ABC, Métromédia, NBC) created the series The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, with the character of the commander in the red bonnet inherited from standard diving dress intended to give the films a "personalized adventure" style. This documentary television series ran for ten years from 1966 to 1976. A second documentary series, The Cousteau Odyssey, ran from 1977 to 1982 on public television stations.

In 1970, he wrote the book The Shark: Splendid Savage of the Sea with his son Philippe. In this book, Cousteau described the oceanic whitetip shark as "the most dangerous of all sharks".

In December 1972, two years after the volcano's last eruption, The Cousteau Society was filming Voyage au bout du monde on Deception Island, Antarctica, when Michel Laval, Calypso's second in command, was struck and killed by a rotor of the helicopter that was ferrying between Calypso and the island.

In 1973, along with his two sons and Frederick Hyman, he created the Cousteau Society for the Protection of Ocean Life, Frederick Hyman being its first President.

In 1975, John Denver released the tribute song " Calypso" on his album , and on the B-side of his hit song " I'm Sorry". "Calypso" became a hit on its own and was later considered the new A-side, reaching No. 2 on the charts.

In 1976, Cousteau located the wreck of HMHS Britannic. He also found the wreck of the French 17th-century ship-of-the-line in coastal waters of Crete.

In 1977, together with Peter Scott, he received the UN International Environment prize.

On 28 June 1979, while the Calypso was on an expedition to Portugal, his second son Philippe, his preferred and designated successor and with whom he had co-produced all his films since 1969, died in a PBY Catalina flying boat crash in the Tagus river near Lisbon. Cousteau was deeply affected. He called his eldest son, the architect Jean-Michel, to his side. This collaboration lasted 14 years.

1980-1990s

From 1980 to 1981, he was a regular on the animal reality show Those Amazing Animals, along with Burgess Meredith, Priscilla Presley, and Jim Stafford.

In 1980, Cousteau traveled to Canada to make two films on the Saint Lawrence River and the Great Lakes, Cries from the Deep and St. Lawrence: Stairway to the Sea.

In 1985, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from U.S. President Ronald Reagan.

From 1986 to 1992, Cousteau released Rediscovery of the World.

On 24 November 1988, he was elected to the Académie française, chair 17, succeeding Jean Delay. His official reception under the cupola took place on 22 June 1989, the response to his speech of reception being given by Bertrand Poirot-Delpech. After his death, he was replaced by Érik Orsenna on 28 May 1998.

In June 1990, the composer Jean Michel Jarre paid homage to the commander by entitling his new album Waiting for Cousteau. He also composed the music for Cousteau's documentary " Palawan, the last refuge".

On 2 December 1990, his wife, Simone Cousteau died of cancer.

In June 1991, in Paris, Jacques-Yves Cousteau remarried, to Francine Triplet, with whom he had (before this marriage) two children, Diane and Pierre-Yves. Francine Cousteau currently continues her husband's work as the head of the Cousteau Foundation and Cousteau Society. From that point, the relations between Jacques-Yves and his elder son, who is 8 years older than Francine, worsened.

In November 1991, Cousteau gave an interview to the UNESCO Courier, in which he stated that he was in favour of human population control and population decrease. Widely quoted on the Internet are these two paragraphs from the interview: "What should we do to eliminate suffering and disease? It's a wonderful idea but perhaps not altogether a beneficial one in the long run. If we try to implement it we may jeopardize the future of our species...It's terrible to have to say this. World population must be stabilized and to do that we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. This is so horrible to contemplate that we shouldn't even say it. But the general situation in which we are involved is lamentable".

In 1992, he was invited to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for the United Nations' International Conference on Environment and Development, and then he became a regular consultant for the UN and the World Bank.

In 1995, Cousteau became involved in a legal battle with his son Jean-Michel, who was advertising the "Cousteau Fiji Islands Resort" in the South Pacific, to prevent him from using the Cousteau name for business purposes in the United States. This resulted in Jean-Michel Cousteau being ordered by the court to not encourage confusion between his for-profit business and his father's non-profit endeavours.

On 11 January 1996, Calypso was accidentally rammed and sunk in the port of Singapore by a barge. The Calypso was refloated and towed home to France.

Though he was not particularly a religious man, Cousteau believed that the teachings of the different major religions provide valuable ideals and thoughts to protect the environment. In a Chapter entitled "The Holy Scriptures and The Environment" in the posthumous work The Human, the Orchid, and the Octopus, he is quoted as stating that "The glory of nature provides evidence that God exists".

Cousteau said that just because fish are cold-blooded does not mean they do not feel pain, and that recreational fishermen only say so to reassure their conscience.

Jacques-Yves Cousteau died of a heart attack on 25 June 1997 in Paris, two weeks after his 87th birthday. He was buried in the family vault at Saint-André-de-Cubzac, his birthplace. An homage was paid to him by the town by naming the street which runs out to the house of his birth "rue du Commandant Cousteau", where a commemorative plaque was placed.

Cousteau's legacy includes more than 120 television documentaries, more than 50 books, and an environmental protection foundation with 300,000 members.

Cousteau liked to call himself an "oceanographic technician". He was, in reality, a sophisticated showman, teacher, and lover of nature. His work permitted many people to explore the resources of the oceans.

His work also created a new kind of scientific communication, criticized at the time by some academics. The so-called " divulgationism", a simple way of sharing scientific concepts, was soon employed in other disciplines and became one of the most important characteristics of modern television broadcasting.

His Oceanographic Museum in Monaco, and perhaps even he himself, has been identified as introducing the Caulerpa "Killer Algae," which is destroying much of the Mediterranean's ecosystem.

The Cousteau Society and its French counterpart, l'Équipe Cousteau, both of which Jacques-Yves Cousteau founded, are still active today. The Society is currently attempting to turn the original into a museum and it is raising funds to build a successor vessel, the Calypso II.

In 2007, the International Watch Company introduced the IWC Aquatimer Chronograph "Cousteau Divers" Special Edition. The timepiece incorporated a sliver of wood from the interior of Cousteau's Calypso research vessel. Having developed the diver's watch, IWC offered support to The Cousteau Society. The proceeds from the timepieces' sales were partially donated to the non-profit organization involved in conservation of marine life and preservation of tropical coral reefs.

Fabien Cousteau, the grandson of Jacques Cousteau, is in the process of constructing a community of ocean flooring analysis stations, called Proteus, off Curaçao at a depth of about 20 m in a marine-protected area. Aquanauts could reside and work in these underwater habitats. Front-end engineering has started in 2022 with the habitat put on the sea bottom in 2025.

During his lifetime, Jacques-Yves Cousteau received these distinctions:

The Silent World (1953, with Frédéric Dumas)

Captain Cousteaus Underwater Treasury (1959, with James Dugan)

The Living Sea (1963, with James Dugan)

World Without Sun (1965)

The Undersea Discoveries of Jacques-Yves Cousteau (1970-1975, 8-volumes, with Philippe Diolé)

The Shark: Splendid Savage of the Sea (1970)

Diving for Sunken Treasure (1971)

Life and Death in a Coral Sea (1971)

The Whale: Mighty Monarch of the Sea (1972)

Octopus and Squid: The Soft Intelligence (1973)

Three Adventures: Galápagos, Titicaca, the Blue Holes (1973)

Diving Companions: Sea Lion, Elephant Seal, Walrus (1974)

Dolphins (1975)

The Ocean World of Jacques Cousteau (1973-78, 21 volumes)

A Bill of Rights for Future Generations (1979)

Life at the Bottom of the World (1980)

The Cousteau United States Almanac of the Environment (1981, a.k.a. The Cousteau Almanac of the Environment: An Inventory of Life on a Water Planet)

Jacques Cousteau's Calypso (1983, with Alexis Sivirine)

Marine Life of the Caribbean (1984, with James Cribb and Thomas H. Suchanek)

Jacques Cousteau's Amazon Journey (1984, with Mose Richards)

Jacques Cousteau: The Ocean World (1985)

The Whale (1987, with Philippe Diolé)

Jacques Cousteau: Whales (1988, with Yves Paccalet)

The Human, The Orchid and The Octopus (and Susan Schiefelbein, coauthor; Bloomsbury 2007)

Jacques Cousteau has been portrayed in films:

The American comedy film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, directed by Wes Anderson and first released in December 2004, portrays Steve Zissou, a fictional oceanographer strongly inspired by Jacques Cousteau.

The French film The Odyssey, directed by Jérôme Salle and first released in October 2016, focuses on Cousteau's life, especially regarding his relation with his first wife, Simone Melchior, and his second son, Philippe Cousteau.

Jacques Cousteau was featured in Epic Rap Battle of History's sixth season, and was portrayed by Peter Shukoff. He faced off against Steve Irwin, portrayed by Lloyd Ahlquist.

1. ^ Lunn, Rosemary E. (8 March 2021). "WDHOF announces new Simone Melchior Cousteau Grant". X-Ray International Dive Magazine. Archived from the original on 28 July 2021.

2. ^ The Silent World. J. Y. Cousteau with Frédéric Dumas. Hamish Hamilton, London. 1953

3. Capitaine de frégate PHILIPPE TAILLIEZ, ^ Plongées sans câble, Arthaud, Paris, January 1954, Dépôt légal 1er trimestre 1954 - Édition N° 605 - Impression N° 243 (in French)

4. ^ Sevellec, E.J. (1 December 2006). "Naissance du GERS et des premiers plongeurs démineurs" (in French). Philippe.tailliez.net. According to Sevellec, the Élie Monnier was an old German tugboat originally called Albatros and handed over to France as a war reparation, and then re-baptised in honor of the maritime engineer Élie Monnier who had disappeared while diving at Mers-el-Kébir on the wreck of the battleship

5. ^ Riffaud, C. (1988). "La règne du scaphandre à casque", in La grande aventure des hommes sous la mer. Users.skynet.be. ISBN 2-226-03502-8.

6. ^ Morton, Michael Quentin (June 2015). "Calypso in the Arabian Gulf: Jacques Cousteau's Undersea Survey of 1954". Liwa. 5 (9): 3-28.

7. ^ Hamblin, Jacob Darwin (2008). Poison in the Well: Radioactive Waste in the Oceans at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press. ISBN 978-0813542201.

8. Cousteau, Jacques; ed. by Schiefelbein, Susan. 2010. ^ The Human, the Orchid, and the Octopus: Exploring and Conserving Our Natural World. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 9781596917552

9. ^ "L'Odyssée : Lambert Wilson dans la peau de Cousteau". Le Figaro. 23 August 2016.

10. ^ "Ce que le biopic sur Cousteau, "L'Odyssée", nous apprend de son côté obscur". The Huffington Post (French Edition). Archived from the original on 17 October 2016.

Undersea Explorer: The Story of Captain Cousteau (1957) by James Dugan

Jacques Cousteau and the Undersea World (2000) by Roger King

Jacques-Yves Cousteau: His Story Under the Sea (2002) by John Bankston

Jacques Cousteau: A Life Under the Sea (2008) by Kathleen Olmstead

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Jacques-Yves Cousteau, (, also , French: [ʒak iv kusto]; 11 June 1910 - 25 June 1997) was a French naval officer, oceanographer, filmmaker and author. He co-invented the first successful Aqua-Lung, open-circuit SCUBA ( self-contained underwater breathing apparatus). The apparatus assisted him in producing some of the first underwater documentaries.

# data[].attributes.body
Boyan Slat

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Boyan Slat, el joven creador de 'The Ocean  Cleanup' y su sueño de limpiar los océanos

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Learn about Thomas Edison's biography. He invented many useful items including the practical light bulb and phonograph. He also helped to found the business General Electric.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Kids learn about the biography of entrepreneur Walt Disney including early life, work as an artist, beginning animation, movies and television, theme parks, and fun facts.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Anne Frank was born to Otto Frank and his wife Edith on June 12, 1929. They named her Annelies Marie. She had a sister Margot who was three years older. They were a Jewish family living in Germany. Their families had lived in Germany for centuries.

By 1932 Adolph Hitler had risen to power in Germany and instead of enjoying a democracy, the German people now suffered under the rule of a dictator. Hitler blamed the Jews for all the problems in the country. Otto realized it was becoming unsafe for his family in Germany and moved them to the Netherlands. He set up a company in Amsterdam making a product that the women used to make homemade jam. It was called Opekta. (Pectinis derived from fruits and will cause jelly and jam to jell. In America you can buy a pectin product called Sure Jell.)

The family was safe for a while, but then in 1940 the Germans invaded the Netherlands and began to arrest and persecute the Jews there. They put restrictions on the Jews and made them wear an identifying yellow star on their clothes. They could not own a business. They could not ride a bicycle. Life became very hard, and the Jews feared for their lives.

Margot, Anne's sister was called to report to a work camp in Germany. The family had been planning a hiding place, but with Margot's call-up they knew they had to hide immediately. And so they did. The date was July 6, 1942.

The hiding place became known as the Secret Annex. It was located at 263 Prinsengracht. The Frank family would occupy two rooms on the first floor. A week later Mr. and Mrs. Van Pels and their son would move into the two rooms on the second floor. From Peter's tiny room they could access the attic where food was stored. There was a small bathroom on the first floor.

The first thing they did was make curtains to prevent anyone from seeing in. An eighth person, Fritz Pfeffer, an older man, a dentist, arrived in November and would share a room with Anne.

Father Voskuijl made a movable bookcase to hide the door through which they entered their quarters.

This picture shows the streetside view of the building. Otto Frank's offices were at the front of the building and the hiding place was at the rear.

There were four people who helped them during the two years and 30 days they were in hiding. Miep Gies, Victor Kugler, Johannes Kleiman and Bep Voskuijl provided food for them, and at great personal risk to their own lives visited daily and brought news from the outside world.

The people in hiding must be very quiet when the warehouse workers are at work downstairs. They can move around when the men are gone for lunch, and at 5:30 in the afternoon when the workers leave the building Anne and the others are free to go downstairs into the office area. Anne calls it their "nightly freedom".

The Franks had brought school books for an extended stay and library books are brought to the group weekly. They spend a lot of time reading, studying, and working correspondence courses.

Anne writes in her diary. She creates an imaginary friend "Kitty" with whom she shares her innermost thoughts in her writings. Sometimes she writes short stories. After hearing on a radio broadcast that there would be a collection of the diaries and writings made during the war, Anne begins to think about making her writings into a book. After a lot of thought she decides she will call it "Achterhuis" (Secret Annex).

She begins rewriting her entries, leaving out some very personal items she would rather not share. For over two months she works rewriting her diaries.

On August 4, 1944 the people in hiding were discovered. Someone, they never found out who, betrayed them and a Secret Service officer and three men of the Dutch police force came up the stairs, entered with guns, and herded them away to jail. The two men who had been helping them were also arrested and taken to the city prison. The two women helpers, Miep and Bep, were left behind. They went into Anne's small room. Her diaries were scattered all over the floor. They collected them and Miep kept them.

The eight people are taken to a transit camp, Westerbork. From that camp people are taken to extermination and concentration camps. During the month they are there they have to break up old batteries. On September 2, 1944 their names appear on the list of people to be moved. They are put on freight cars and three days later they arrive at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. The people in the freight cars were divided. Men and women were separated and then they were divided into groups; one group would go to labor camps, and those who could not work would be killed in the gas chamber.

By the end of October Anne and her sister Margot are transferred to another camp, Bergen-Belsen. They both become ill there and died of typhus in March of 1945. They died just a few weeks before the British Army arrived and freed the prisoners.

The four helpers survived the war and so did Anne's father Otto Frank. He searched desperately for word of the fate of his family. Finally in July he met two sisters who witnessed the death of Anne and Margot.

After Otto learned of the death of his daughters, Miep gave him the pages of the diary she had been saving. He was surprised at the depth of her writings. This was an Anne he never knew. He honored her wish to have her writings published as a book. First the book was published in the Dutch language, then German, French, and English. The book was made into a stage play, then into a film.

Today when you see the word "Holocaust"it usually refers to this time in which the German Army systematicallykilled nearly 6 million Jews. People need to learn about the Holocaust and the reasons why it happened, lest periods of hatred and discrimination cause a similar genocide. Some say it never happened at all, but we know it did because there are too many witnesses and survivors who lived to tell the world about those darkest of times.

Today if you visit the site of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp you can see a memorial to Anne Frank and her sister Margot.

This biography by Patsy Stevens, a retired teacher, was written in 2007.

Play an Online Game at Quia

From Word Central's Student Dictionary
by Merriam - Webster
(Pronunciation note: the schwa sound is shown by ə)

'hoe-lə-cost or hau-lə-caust
Function: noun
1 : a sacrifice destroyed by fire
2 : a thorough destruction especially by fire
3 often capitalized : the killing of European civilians
and especially Jews by the Nazis during World War II

Pronunciation: 'jen-ə-side
Function: noun
the deliberate destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group

Function: noun
a camp where persons (as prisoners of war, political prisoners, or refugees)
are detained

Pronunciation: sis-tə-'mat-ik
Function: adjective
carried out or acting with thoroughness or regularity
sys-tem-at-i-cal-ly, adverb

Pronunciation: 'dəch
Function: adjective
of or relating to the Netherlands, its inhabitants, or their language

Pronunciation: 'die-ə-re
Function: noun
a daily record especially of personal experiences and thoughts;
also : a book for keeping such a record

'pek-tən
Function: noun
any of various substances in plant tissues that dissolve
in water and produce a gel which is the basis of fruit jellies;
also : a commercial product rich in pectins

Anne Frank's History

Anne Frank Center - USA Website

Article: The Lessons of Anne Frank

Anne Frank in the World 1929 - 1945
Teacher workbook, Utah Education Network

Anne Frank
at Wikipedia

United State Holocaust Memorial Museum
watch videos of survivors of the Holocaust

English Lesson Plan on Anne Frank

A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust

Anne Frank Lesson Plan
Lesson Snips.com
(You must register. Some lessons free)

Lessons From the Holocaust
Lesson Snips.com
(You must register to access lessons.)

Anne Frank Channel on YouTube
subscribe (free) and watch videos

At biography.com search for Anne Frank.
Scroll the panel for the "Video & Audio Results".

Press "Go" to search for books about Anne Frank

A LIBRARY OF
ONLINE BOOKS and BOOK PREVIEWS

Order the following books from Amazon.

Anne Frank
by David Colbert (selected pages) Order here

Anne Frank
by Yona Zeldis McDonough, Malcah Zeldis (selected pages) Order here

Who Was Anne Frank?
by Ann Abramson, Nancy Harrison (selected pages) Order here

Anne Frank
by Anne Schraff (selected pages) Order here

Anne Frank and the Children of the Holocaust
by Carol Ann Lee (selected pages) Order here

Anne Frank and Me (stage play)
by Cherie Bennett, Jeff Gottesfeld (selected pages) Order here

The play of the diary of Anne Frank
by Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, Anne Frank (selected pages) Order here

The World of Anne Frank: a complete resource guide
by Betty Merti (selected pages) Order here

Anne Frank, the Biography
by Melissa Muller (selected pages) Order here

Anne Frank, Life in Hiding
by Johanna Hurwitz (selected pages) Order here

Anne Frank: Hidden Hope
by Rita Thievon Mullin (selected pages) Order here

Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl (Scholastic Literature Guide Grades 4-8)
(selected pages) Order here

Anne Frank Remembered: The Story of the Woman Who Helped to Hide the Frank Family
by Miep Gies, Alison Leslie Gold (selected pages) Order here

Anne Frank: The Young Writer Who Told the World Her Story (National Geographic)
by Ann Kramer (selected pages) Order here

Anne Frank Reading Guide
by Jenny Sime (selected pages) Order here

Anne Frank, People We Should Know (Weekly Reader)
by Jonatha A. Brown (selected pages)

Anne Frank: Young Diarist
by Ruth Ashby (selected pages)

Anne Frank, Bio Graphics
by Joe Dunn, Ben Dunn (selected pages)

A Picture Book of Anne Frank
by David A. Adler, Karen Ritz (selected pages)

The Life of Anne Frank, Graphic edition
by Nicholas Saunders (selected pages)

Anne Frank, History Maker Bios
by Laura Hamilton Waxman (selected pages)

Diary of Anne Frank, the Play
by Anne Frank, Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett (selected pages)

Puzzles on these pages courtesy of
Songs of Praise and Armored Penguin

Photos courtesy Wikipedia,

Photo of a replica of Anne Frank's diary courtesy of Flickr user jim 12957

Photo of the Statue Anne Frank in Utrecht by Wikipedia user Brbbl

This page displayed 290,485 times.

This is a mobile page of Garden of Praise. You are using a desktop computer. Try viewing the mobile pages on your smart phone.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Anne Frank was born to Otto Frank and his wife Edith on June 12, 1929. They named her Annelies Marie. She had a sister Margot who was three years older. They were a Jewish family living in Germany. Their families had lived in Germany for centuries.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
by Jim Hawkins from Children's Hospice International

When I grow up, I want to be a peacemaker. My biggest role model for this is Jimmy Carter, who has been a wonderful peanut farmer, politician, and peacemaker... I call him the 'perfect hero. - Mattie Stepanek

Jim Hawkins Mattie suffered from a hereditary disease called dysautonomic mitochondrial myopathy, a rare form of muscular dystrophy that had already claimed the lives of his three older siblings. Mattie's mother, Jeni, also suffers from the same disease. Mattie needed to take a portable oxygen tank on wheels with him wherever he went. Many times his illness would land him in bed in the intensive care unit of the children's hospital. Outside, Mattie was only able to move about in his motorized wheelchair. Even though Mattie battled a terminal illness for many years, Mattie never saw his condition as an obstacle between him and his goals.

He began writing when he was about 3 years old. Before he passed away in June, 2004, Mattie had written thousands of poems, dozens of essays and short stories, and presented a bound anthology of his writing to the Library of Congress. He received many awards for his writing, including the Melinda A. Lawrence International Book Award in 1999 for "most inspirational work."

Here is a sample of his poetry:

On Being a Champion

A Champion is a winner,
A hero...
Someone who never gives up
Even when the going gets rough.
A champion is a member of
A winning team...
Someone who overcomes challenges
Even when it requires creative solutions.
A champion is an optimist,
A hopeful spirit...
Someone who plays the game,
Even when the game is called life.
There can be a champion in each of us,
If we live as a winner,
If we live as a member of the team,
If we live with a hopeful spirit,
For Life.

From the book JOURNEY THROUGH HEARTSONGS by Mattie J.T. Stepanek. Copyright (c) 2001 Mattie J.T. Stepanek. Published by Hyperion. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Jim Hawkins His love of reading and writing evolved into public speaking, earning him the Maryland State Goodwill Ambassadorship for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. During his short lifetime, he enthusiastically participated in fundraising events to help find a cure for neuromuscular diseases, and to encourage children and families suffering from these diseases to celebrate life until a cure is found.

In Mattie's words, ". . .we must remember to play after every storm and to celebrate the gift of life as we have it, or else life becomes a task, rather than a gift. We must always listen to the song in our heart, and share that song with others."

Little Mattie has somehow acquired more wisdom in his short life than most of us do after decades of living. Through his poetry, he expresses wisdom in a way that touches anyone's heart. With his unabashed enthusiasm for life Mattie has charmed everyone who has crossed his path. Mattie has inspired many people, young and old, to overcome every obstacle they may encounter and strive for their goals with dignity and humanity. THANK YOU, MATTIE!
The beliefs, viewpoints and opinions expressed in this hero submission on the website are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the beliefs, viewpoints and opinions of The MY HERO Project and its staff.
Extra Info

Jeni Stepanek wrote in the MY HERO Guestbook: My hero is: Mattie Stepanek, my son. Through Mattie's innocent and uncensored expressions about life as he sees it, and feels it, and thinks about it, I have been inspired to think more deeply about my own life. Sometimes, it takes the wisdom of a child, for us to really appreciate what we DO have in life, and to remember to celebrate the gift of every day. Lyn Mox added this comment about MATTIE in the MY HERO Guestbook: My hero is: Mattie Stepanek. Just wanted to say that in my personal life, Mattie is my hero and glad to see that someone else outside of my family and friends agrees. Mattie is friends and schoolmates with my son. Please keep giving us more jewels like Mattie and his mother Jeni. Rebecca Corrine Schonwalder from Pennsylvania wrote to MY HERO about Mattie on December 16, 1998: I honor that a person like Mattie Stepanek would tell people about how he feels and he is only 6. I am 17 and I don't know how to tell people how I feel. On October 19, 2001, Dale-Anne Smith wrote about Mattie and his poetry: Thank you so much for your page about Mattie. I am a 29-year-old single mother of a beautiful little 2-year-old girl. In this last year, since separating from her father, and moving from the States back to my home in Canada, I have gone through many dark moments of fear and uncertainty. Reading Mattie's poems on your site really helped me see things in their true perspective. He is a true hero, an old soul, and a blessing to this planet. I wish I could hug that little man right now and breathe in his energy; he has touched my heart in a profound way. After seeing Mattie on the Oprah Winfrey Show, 81-year-old Elizabeth Haestie wrote: I "met" Mattie for the first time today on the Oprah show - I am an 81-year-old English lady, in good health, but sometimes feel somewhat depressed that I don't have a great many more years ahead of me in this life. But Mattie knocked all those feelings out of my mind altogether, and I don't think they will ever return. I am an "old soul" too, Mattie, as you are, and I shall remember you and your mother all the rest of my life. You are my hero, too. On 12 October 2003, Jim Hawkins wrote: Mattie was the opening speaker at the CHI World Congress in Alexandria in September and, of course, wowed everyone. He surprised me while I was taking photos by announcing the creation of a "Mattie Stepanek Champion Award" and presenting it to me. That brought a lump to my throat. The "Mattie Stepanek Champion Award" was created two years ago by Ann Armstrong-Dailey and CHI to honor Mattie's contributions to children everywhere. Read other comments from visitors to MY HERO about Mattie. Add your comments about Mattie and other inspirational heroes to the MY HERO Guestbook.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When I grow up, I want to be a peacemaker. My biggest role model for this is Jimmy Carter, who has been a wonderful peanut farmer, politician, and peacemaker... I call him the 'perfect hero.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Wang Yani has been painting since she was three years old.

# data[].attributes.body
"A smile is the light in your window that tells others that there is a caring, sharing person inside."
Denis Waitley

# data[].attributes.body
"My mission in life is to be kind, compassionate, caring, and loving in order to find and feel the deepest joy of life".
Debasish Mridha

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.authors[].name
Colaboradores de los proyectos Wikimedia

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Julio Verne - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr.; January 15, 1929 - April 4, 1968) was an American Christian minister, activist, and political philosopher who was one of the most prominent leaders in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Kids learn about Mother Teresa's biography. A great humanitarian from India.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This is a complete biography on Florence Nightingale

Florence Nightingale

Florence Nightingale was born on May 12, 1820, in Florence, Italy, while her wealthy parents were on a tour of Europe. She was named after the city where she was born.

Early Life and Education

Florence was raised on the family estate at Lea Hurst, England. Her father taught her Greek, Latin, French, German, Italian, history, philosophy, and mathematics. Like most upper-class mothers at this time, Frances Nightingale expected her daughters to marry, look after a home, and maybe do some charity work. Florence thought there was more to life.

Aspirations to be a Nurse

When Florence was growing up, she helped take care of poor and sick people in the village near her family's estate. When she was 17, Florence felt God wanted her to be a nurse. In Victorian England, most nurses were uneducated and thought to be of questionable morals, Hospital conditions at that time were terrible. Doctors did operations with no anesthetic, and many people who went to hospitals died. Florence began to visit hospitals to see the conditionsunder which patients were cared for.

She Finally Gets Her Parents' Blessings

In 1851, her parents finally gave her permission to study nursing. She went to the Institution of Protestant Deaconesses at Kaiserswerth in Germany for four months of training. When she came back to England, a rich friend asked Florence to run a London hospital for "invalid gentlewomen." There was no pay, so her father gave her an annual income of 500 Pounds (about $68,000 today). This meant she could live comfortably and pursue her career. She made lots of important changes at the hospital.

The Lady with the Lamp

In 1854, Russia invaded Turkey and the Crimean War began. Britain, France, and Turkey fought Russia. Sidney Herbert, the British war minister, asked Florence to supervise a team of 38 nurses at the military hospital in Scutari, Turkey. The hospital was overcrowded and filthy. Soldiers were not washed and lay on the floor because there were not enough beds. They had to eat moldy bread. There were no proper toilets. Drains were blocked. Rats and insects ran everywhere. The smell was terrible. Without good food, clean bandages, clean beds, and clean water, many died from diseases. Florence and her nurses greatly improved the conditions and many more soldiers survived. She earned the name "The Lady with the Lamp" because she would visit soldiers at night with a small lantern in her hand.

Return to England with Honors

When Florence returned to England, the Queen presented her with an engraved brooch that is known as the "Nightingale Jewel" and granted her $250,000 from the British government. Florence used the money to start the Nightingale Training School for Nurses in London. Trained nurses were sent to hospitals all over Britain. They introduced her ideas and trained others. Florence Nightingale never really recovered from the physical strain of the Crimean War. She almost never left home, and she stayed in bed much of the time, but she continued to fight for reform of military hospitals and medical care. She died in London, England, on August 13, 1910.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This is a complete biography on Florence Nightingale Florence Nightingale Florence Nightingale was born on May 12, 1820, in Florence, Italy, while her wealthy parents were on a tour of Europe. She was named after the city where she was born. Florence was raised on the family estate at Lea Hurst, England.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
ANA DODSON - CNN Heroes 2007 - PERUVIAN HEARTS (www.peruvianhearts.org)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
My hero is 12-year-old Anthony Leanna.

Anthony started a program when he was just 9 years old called Heavenly Hats. Anthony's program provides brand new hats to cancer patients who lose their hair due to cancer treatments. Since he has started this program, Anthony has donated more than 15,000 brand new hats to over 70 hospitals and clinics around the United States.

Anthony lives in Suamico, Wisconsin, about 10 miles north of Green Bay, Wisconsin.

He lives today and goes to Bay View Middle School.

Anthony is very important to me because he has a huge heart. He thinks about everyone else before himself. Anthony has made a difference in his school, community and country, and he makes us very proud to call him our son.
The beliefs, viewpoints and opinions expressed in this hero submission on the website are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the beliefs, viewpoints and opinions of The MY HERO Project and its staff.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
My hero is 12-year-old Anthony Leanna. Anthony started a program when he was just 9 years old called Heavenly Hats. Anthony's program provides brand new hats to cancer patients who lose their hair due to cancer treatments. Since he has started this program, Anthony has donated more than 15,000 brand new hats to over 70 hospitals and clinics around the United States.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"Healthy food is a basic human right." - Robin Emmons

Robin Emmons became an organic farmer to fight hunger. It all started when she had a small garden in her backyard in which she grew a few vegetables. From there it grew into her own nonprofit organization, Vimeo Sow Much Good. Now, Robin and her two hundred volunteers grow fresh fruits, vegetables, and more for the hungry, low-income families in Charlotte, North Carolina. Robin Emmons shows her kindness, determined, hardworking attitude, and her positivity, doing everything she can towards helping the families in need. This makes Robin, a true hero.

Robin Emmons' heroic journey started when she was doing a kind favor for her formerly homeless brother. Robin demonstrated a simple act of kindness when she was looking out for her brother's health. "I had a small garden, so I thought, 'Well I'll just put in some extra rows,' I began making weekly deliveries." This shows her love and hope for her brother who was recently in jail. Robin's kindness grew when she quit her own job in 2008 and gave up her high-end lifestyle to help more than just her brother, but an entire city. Robin dedicates her time to helping all the families that need her. She is a true model of kindness, and she continues to prove it.

Robin Emmons may be a kind lady, but she is not afraid of hard work. She loves seeing satisfied customers buying her food, and strives to keep everyone happy. "I decided to rip up my whole backyard and make it all a garden," she said. Robin knows how her work affects people in such a positive manner. She started off with just herself but now has gathered over 200 volunteers to work with her on 9 acres of land. Together, Sow Much Good has grown more than 26,000 pounds of fresh, organic, chemical-free, fruits and vegetables for families who are striving for a more healthy lifestyle. Even though her former lifestyle consisted of designer suits and a high paycheck, Robin would much rather be in the dirt, changing lives, one family at a time.

Robin has a positive look on everything, helping each family as much as she can. She aims to make the 72,000 low-income families of Charlotte live healthy and affordable lifestyles. Not only does Robin sell her food at the lowest price possible, but she helps even more by offering cooking demonstrations and canning classes, and she distributes recipe cards. Whatever she can do to help, she does, knowing it is making the families happy, and most importantly, healthy. One of the family moms said, "I couldn't believe all the beautiful, fresh vegetables, and the price she was charging was phenomenal." This shows how her happy customers react to all of Robin's hard work.

Most people like the money and the the benefits for themselves of selling things, but that's what's different about Robin. Her reasons for spending all of her time on others is simply for their benefit. Robin felt like her "life was empty. I just felt like I needed to do more." Robin uses her gardening skills, kindness, hardworking attitude, and above and beyond mindset to do all she can to help her town of Charlotte. She aims to spread her organization nationwide someday, but at the moment, she is the greatest hero to all the families counting on her in North Carolina. Robin's life is rewarding in its benefits to others, showing her heroic qualities. Robin is the true definition of hero.
The beliefs, viewpoints and opinions expressed in this hero submission on the website are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the beliefs, viewpoints and opinions of The MY HERO Project and its staff.
Related Links

CNN Heroes - Robin was CNN's 'Hero of the Year', with a featured story about her.

People Magazine - People Magazine did a story on Robin's amazing deeds.

Extra Info

Before Robin Emmons started gardening for the needy, she worked at an American bank for twenty years. Robin has never looked back on quitting her job though, because now she feels as if her life has meaning. She was also originally from Boston, but now lives with her husband in North Carolina.

Bibliography

Toner, Kathleen. "Creating an oasis in a Southern 'food desert'." [Online] Available www.cnn.com/2013/10/22/cnn-heroes-top-10-robin-emmons/.

Ballard, Michaele. "Robin Emmons: Why I Quit My Bank Job to Feed North Carolina's Hungry." [Online] Available http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20615310,00.html.

Emmons, Robin. "Sow Much Good." [Online] Available http://www.sowmuchgood.org.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"Healthy food is a basic human right." - Robin Emmons Robin Emmons became an organic farmer to fight hunger. It all started when she had a small garden in her backyard in which she grew a few vegetables. From there it grew into her own nonprofit organization, Vimeo Sow Much Good.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Vivienne Harr was on to something when she told people to simply pay what was in their hearts. It's not exactly a common business practice, but then Vivienne was only eight when she suggested the strategy. Turns out, she's one tenacious saleswoman with some strong ideas.

You see, Vivienne made a lemonade stand. This, in and of itself, isn't that different from what children across the country do every summer. But what is different is that Vivienne wanted to raise money to free children in slavery. She called it Make A Stand lemonade.

"I just thought it was wrong and I had to help," she says simply.

Her goal? $100,000. Yes, that's not a typo. Vivienne wanted to raise $100,000 to free 500 child slaves. What's more, she was willing to stick with it - every day, rain or shine - until she made good on that promise.

She was motivated by a photograph taken by Lisa Kristine, a San Francisco-based photographer whose image of two young brothers from the Himalayas had made a big impression upon Vivienne. It was two boys holding hands, brothers about her age, forced to carry granite boulders from a strap around their heads. Kristine took the pictures to move others into action. And boy, was Vivienne activated.

"I thought slavery ended with Abraham Lincoln," Vivienne says on the Make a Stand website. "I was wrong about that. I learned that slavery is everywhere and even here in America. I wanted to do something, because compassion is not compassion without action."

Since the only way she knew to make money was selling lemonade, she did that. "I decided to do my lemonade stand every day rain or shine for a whole year to raise money to help these kids," she says. "It was a gigantic, audacious goal," says her father Eric.

So on Monday June 25th, 2012, she took her home-made stand (she had help from her folks) and positioned it in a public park in her hometown of Fairfax, California. She brought people to tears with her determination. Vivienne raised quite a bit of money on that first day. And the next. One week turned into one month.

When Vivienne decided that her lemonade should be "free because every child should be free," the value of each lovingly made cup of organic lemonade sweetened with agave nectar and offered with optional mint and raspberries soared from an average of $2 to $18. One cup brought in $1,000.

Her father, a social media professional, helped spread her story with a Twitter feed. When New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof tweeted about Vivienne's lemon-aid on day #52, more than $18,000 rolled in in just 2 days alone. By day #56, she had made $30,000. Media from all around the U.S. and as far away as Hong Kong to Brazil, have covered her story.

Every day Vivienne was at her stand, even after summer ended. She continued to open her stand, every day changing the chalk number on the front of her stand to show just how many days she had been at it. On the 173rd day, she set up her stand in Times Square at the request of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Not surprisingly, that's where she surpassed her goal and was able to write a check for $101,320 (in truth, her parents had to sign it) to Not For Sale, a California non-profit focused on ending child slave labor.

Her parents were so proud. And probably a bit ready to move on. "My parents said, 'Honey, you did it! You're done!'' says Vivienne. "I said, 'Is child slavery done?' They said 'No.' I said, 'Then I'm not done."

Indeed, Vivienne continued to pulp organic lemons and set up her lemonade stand every day for a full 365 days. On the 366th, Make a Stand Lemon-aid in a bottle was introduced, and the street-side lemonade stand moved online. It's now also sold at 150+ grocery stores. The "pay what's in your heart" model is still used.

Her father quit his job to work full-time on realizing Vivienne's dream of ending slavery in her lifetime one bottle of lemonade at a time.

Vivienne's new 501(c)3, The Make a Stand Foundation, seeks to deliver on Vivienne's vision: "I want to help free the 18 million children in slavery and keep them safe. Free and safe." She has become a leading global voice in the fight against child slavery.

With 30 million slaves worldwide - and half of them children - there is plenty of work to be done. Make A Stand lemonade donates 5% of its sales to Free The Slaves, Nepal Youth Foundation, UNICEF, the International Programme On the Elimination of Child Labor, and Gems: Girls Educational & Mentoring Services.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but for nine-year-old Vivienne Harr, one picture has been worth all the effort. And for countless children enslaved around the world, this one girl is priceless.

"If done right, [Make a Stand] could not just raise money to end child slavery, but perhaps create a role model for nonprofits and all types of businesses." ~ The New York Times

Twitter honored Vivienne by allowing her to ring the bell at their IPO on November 7 th, 2013.They chose her because she is "a symbol of the power of one person - and how Twitter can be used to change the world."

When Sue Glader asked Vivienne, "Who is your hero?" Vivienne replied:

"My hero?
it is the child in slavery who doesn't give up hope.
think about this.
you have to work all day,
and you're hurt,
and you can't leave.
but you hold on to hope
and you keep going.
that's a hero to me.
i hope these kids can hold on to hope,
because we're coming.
we're coming."
-- Vivienne Harr

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Vivienne Harr was on to something when she told people to simply pay what was in their hearts. It's not exactly a common business practice, but then Vivienne was only eight when she suggested the strategy. Turns out, she's one tenacious saleswoman with some strong ideas. You see, Vivienne made a lemonade stand.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Ryan Hreljac (born 30 May 1991) is a Canadian activist, who established the Ryan's Well Foundation to bring water to people in developing countries. He has received numerous awards for his work, and he was the youngest person ever to be bestowed with the Order of Ontario

Hreljac is the son of Susan and Mark Hreljac of Kemptville, Ontario. He has three brothers: Keegan, Jordan and Jimmy. Jimmy Akana was Hreljac's first pen pal from Uganda. Jimmy's parents disappeared during the country's civil war and he was raised by an aunt. He used to get up at midnight so that he could fetch water for his aunt before school. The two boys met during Hreljac's visit in 2000 to the Angolo Primary School in Uganda, where the first well that he funded was drilled. Jimmy was later abducted by a rebel group, Lord's Resistance Army, and then escaped to the home of an aid worker. The Hreljac family paid for his schooling for a couple of years and then brought him to Canada. Ryan's family adopted Jimmy, and he became a Canadian citizen in 2007.

The brothers both graduated from high school in June 2000. After his graduation from St. Michael's Catholic High School in Kemptville, Ontario, Hreljac graduated in 2013 from University of King's College in Halifax, Nova Scotia; his field of study was International Development and Political Science.[citation needed ] Hreljac was employed by Youth Ottawa, a nongovernmental organization after he graduated in 2013. About 20 people sit on the Ottawa Youth Engagement Committee to represent the interests of young people in the capital city's politics.

While six years old, Hreljac learned in school that many people in Africa have a very hard time getting access to clean water. Hreljac began raising money for those affected by the global water crisis by doing household chores, which netted him $70 over a four-month period. Doing more chores and fund-raising, within twelve months he had raised $2,000, which was the cost to build a well, according to WaterCan, a non-profit organization that provides clean water to poor countries. In January 1999, he sent the money to WaterCan, who had the first well drilled in northern Uganda alongside the Angolo Public School. It was built by the Canadian Physicians for Aid and Relief that year.

In two years, he raised $61,000. The Canadian International Development Agency heard of Hreljac's efforts and matched $2 for every dollar that he raised. He told his story on The Oprah Winfrey Show.

Hreljac founded Ryan's Well Foundation, a registered Canadian charity, in 2001 to build in Africa and educate children about sanitation and safe water. The foundation has three ways to educate school children about water issues, the Youth in Action program, the Getting Involved program and the School Challenge program.[citation needed ]

The foundation's objective has expanded to build wells anywhere in the world. Millions of dollars for water and sanitation projects in Africa, Central America, and South Asia. The foundation has brought clean water to more than 892,725 people in 16 developing countries, through 1,166 water and sanitation projects. It has partners in twelve countries, including Burkina Faso, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, Togo and Haiti to identify the communities most in need of a water or sanitation project. It has worked with Rotary Clubs on well projects. By 2015, it completed 900 projects benefiting 824,038 people. Some of the projects were for rain harvesting tanks in areas-like Guatemala, Haiti, and India-where that was the optimal solution for safe water. The 1,000th well was dug in the fall of 2015 in northern Uganda, in a district neighboring the first well. Supporters of the foundation include Matt Damon, Oprah Winfrey, Jane Goodall, and Prince Charles.

Hreljac became Assistant Project Manager at the foundation in January 2015, in preparation for a June 2015 opening for Project Manager. His on-the-job training included trips to Kenya, Burkina Faso, and Uganda to train locals how to maintain their wells. He has also traveled extensively-including Brazil, Mexico, Qatar, and Argentina-to speak about the foundation.

Hreljac received the World of Children Awards in 2003, and a second time at the Montage Beverly Hills in April 2016 as an alumni winner. In 2004, he was named a Paul Harris Fellow. Hreljac was made a Lifesaver hero by The My Hero Project by late 2010. He is the youngest person ever to receive the Order of Ontario. He has also been awarded the Canadian Meritorious Service Medal, the Duke of Edinburgh Gold Award, The Wolf Award, and Planet Africa's Nelson Mandela Humanitarian Award.

Ryan's Well, directed by Lalita Krishna in 2001, tells the story of the first well.

Blue Gold: World Water Wars, a documentary in 2008 in which Hreljac appears.

Get Involved!, a television show in which Hreljac appears in 2008.

Return to Ryan's Well, a 2015 documentary, tells the story of Ryan Hreljac's return to his first well site at Angolo Primary School in Uganda and how the well changed the lives of the people in the area. The 27-minute film was also directed by Krishna. It was selected for the Planet in Focus Film Festival, one of the most significant environmental festivals that takes place in North America, that occurred in Toronto in October 2015.

The Water Princess is a book about a girl, Gie Gie, who walks with her mother each day to collect water. It is based upon the early life of Georgie Badiel, a model, who grew up in Burkina Faso. She established a foundation that partners with Ryan's Well Foundation to bring clean water to African communities.

Blue Gold. "The Action Plan: Emergency Aid".

Ellis, Deborah (November 11, 2016). "How Do You Explain the Refugee Crisis to Children? New Picture Books Can Help". The New York Times.

Jewell, Wendy (September 30, 2015). "Ryan Hreljac". The My Hero Project.

Ottawa Citizen (March 20, 2016). "The UpBeat: Ryan's Well Foundation founder honoured by youth organization". Ottawa Citizen.

Schnurr, Joanne (May 8, 2014). "Return to Ryan's Well 15 years later".

Smith, Patrick (September 25, 2015). "The UpBeat: Ryan's Well Foundation reaches milestone in clean water drive". Ottawa Citizen.

Westendorp, Jennifer (October 9, 2015a). 'Return to Ryan's Well' premieres in Kemptville. Inside Ottawa Valley.

Westendorp, Jennifer (January 22, 2015b). Ryan Hreljac takes on new role at Ryan's Well Foundation. Inside Ottawa Valley.

Woods, Tiffany (April 2008). The Rotarian. Rotary International. p. 29. ISSN 0035-838X.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Ryan Hreljac (born 30 May 1991) is a Canadian activist, who established the Ryan's Well Foundation to bring water to people in developing countries. He has received numerous awards for his work, and he was the youngest person ever to be bestowed with the Order of Ontario Hreljac is the son of Susan and Mark Hreljac of Kemptville, Ontario.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Kids learn about the biography of Rosa Parks, civil rights activist who refused to give up her seat on the bus.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Kids learn about the biography of Helen Keller, blind and deaf woman who learned to read, write, and talk.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
by Brynn from Connecticut

Razia Jan, founder of the Zabuli Education Center, says while her life in America was fulfilling and rich, her dream was "to do something for Afghanistan and educate the girls." Razia provides a free education to 34 area girls in a two story, 14 room building in Deh' Subz, Afghanistan and is a true example of a hero! Although she has many everyday ordeals, she is not afraid of them and continues to do exemplary work to help girls.

Razia Jan, 68, was born in the 1940's in Afghanistan. She traveled to the United States to attend college in 1970. Much of her family fled Afghanistan or were killed during the Russian Invasion. She became an American citizen in 1990. Razia opened a tailoring business and raised a son, but was always involved in philanthropic efforts in Duxbury, Massachusetts. Razia was personally affected by September 11. She turned her store into a workshop and launched a campaign to help victims, first responders, U.S. soldiers, and Afghan children. Razia and volunteers shipped care packages to U.S. soldiers and more than 30,000 boxes of shoes for soldiers to give to Afghan children. But, on a visit to her homeland in 2002, Razia realized that the women and girls were still suffering from years of Taliban control. Razia still had a dream to educate the girls and it became even clearer when she saw that the women had no rights or a say in anything.

In 2005, Razia began raising funds through her Massachusetts-based nonprofit, Razia's Ray of Hope. When she visited Afghanistan, Razia was able to negotiate with the Ministry of Education to secure land for her school. At first when the Zabuli Education Center first opened, most of the men discouraged the ideas of girls going to school. But now, Razia says that the men are proud of the girls.

Razia Jan is a hero because while every day is a struggle, she continues to share her passion for learning with the girls of her school and doesn't stop even if she is threatened. Everyday, security guards have to check the doors and windows and test the water to make sure it is not poisonous. Razia has gotten threats and a school on the other side of town has even experienced grenades thrown at them. These challenges do not make Razia back down. In fact, they just encourage her even more to continue her dream of providing an education for girls.

Razia is both a hero and a role model because she provides a free education to girls in Afghanistan. The Zabuli Education Center teaches math, science, religion and three languages: English, Farsi and Pashto. At first, the girls couldn't write their names but now they can all read and write. A hero isn't just superhuman or a philanthropist everyone knows about. Heroes are regular people, just like you and me who are choosing to devote their lives to the well being of others. Razia is an example of an ordinary woman doing extraordinary things.
The beliefs, viewpoints and opinions expressed in this hero submission on the website are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the beliefs, viewpoints and opinions of The MY HERO Project and its staff.
Related Links

Razia's Ray of Hope - is a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the lives of women and children in Afghanistan through community-based education.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Razia Jan, founder of the Zabuli Education Center, says while her life in America was fulfilling and rich, her dream was "to do something for Afghanistan and educate the girls." Razia provides a free education to 34 area girls in a two story, 14 room building in Deh' Subz, Afghanistan and is a true example of a hero!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Juan Pablo II - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Aitan Grossman - ADVOCATE | Not in Our Town

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
At age 12, Aitan Grossman was inspired by "An Inconvenient Truth" and began a journey that led him to use music to advocate for the preservation of the natural landscape around him. This video is part of a series produced by Not In Our School's parent company, The Working Group, for the Institute for Advancing Unity.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
L'Oreal Paris Women of Worth - Valerie Weisler

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Roberto Gómez Bolaños - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Raimundo Arruda Sobrinho was homeless in Brazil, for nearly 35 years. In April 2011, he was befriended by a young woman named Shalla Monteiro. Impressed by his poetry she created a Facebook Page to feature Raimundo's writing. Neither could have expected what happened next.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Sophie Delezio was an ambassador for 2008 World Youth Day.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
“We need to include the excluded and preach peace.” Pope Francis

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.
-St. Francis de Assisi

Philip Fruytiers [CC BY 2.0] via Wikimedia I have been all things unholy.
If God can work through me, he can work through anyone.
-St. Francis de Assisi

While it is commonly known that St. Francis of Assisi was a lover of both creation and the Creator, his role as a grassroots environmentalist is often surprisingly underplayed in biographical synopsis of his life which center mainly upon his profound journey of faith.

Decreed the Patron Saint of the Environment/ Ecology and of Animals, Francis' latter life was not only an unblemished model of religious devotion, but an exemplary paragon of harmonious existence on Earth. He was a friend to man and beast, an admirer of the sun and of nature, and a peacemaker in every sense of the word.

Francis was not merely at peace with his fellow man -- he was at peace with all living things, everything beautiful that his eyes could behold. He wrote hymns of praise to his God for the creations he felt so blessed to behold, and he wrote poems to his "Brother Sun" and "Sister Moon," even repeatedly praising his "Sister Death" upon his deathbed -- as he felt so much at one with creation that he considered the sun his brother, the moon, his sister, all men his siblings.

Francis felt compelled to reach out to the voiceless, the rejected, and the needy. He embraced and assisted lepers, whom, at the time, were outcasts of society, their skin condition causing them to be feared. He visited hospitals and cared for the sick. He sent food to thieves. He befriended women and recognized their abilities and their intelligence, a concept foreign in that time.

Yet again, his allegiance did not only lie with human beings. He was deeply committed to the well-being of the environment and of all of creation in as grass roots a fashion as has ever been seen. He lived with animals. He rejoiced amongst nature. He preached to the birds to remind them to praise their Creator for the blessings they had. He tamed a wild wolf and made it one of his many pets. Yet, he understood the plight of nature and the circle of life, albeit brutal at times. Despite, he felt that his Creator would not create evil, and hence, everything around him was good and accordingly, should be treated with courtesy and kindness and generosity, from the earthworm to the lamb, the cicada to the wolf. It is perhaps because they recognized his genuine sincerity towards their existence that the animals felt so drawn to him as well.

Simply put, Francis was a heartfelt ally to everything and everyone around him. From man to beast, from the trees to the stones, from the sun to the moon to the changing seasons - Francis was their kindred spirit. He did not call judgment on mankind for their use of the environment, be it animals for food, trees for shelter, etc. Instead, he simply urged humankind to show respect, humility, and love towards their fellow inhabitants of the earth and surroundings, and likewise, he expected the same from other creation. He felt that by embracing and rejoicing in the wonders around them, mankind would naturally then be drawn to perform acts out of love and respect rather than anger and domination.

He conversed with the universe. He spoke to his Brother Fire, his Sister Moon, with the fowl of the sky, and the beasts of the earth. Yet for as much as he lived in a spiritual realm, he was entirely human. He made no attempts to deify himself. He expected no reward for his life of service. He simply lived to serve and love in harmony.

Unknown author [Public domain] via Wikimedia

Yet his story is that much more profound considering the sacrifices he willingly made and the lifestyle he corrected to reach this oneness with creation.

Also known as Francis Bernardone, or il Poverello, St. Francis de Assisi was born Giovanni di Bernadone, named by his mother after John the Baptist on October 4th, 1181 in Umbria, Italy. The son of a rich cloth merchant, his father changed his name to Francis because he allegedly didn't want his child named after a saint. Though blessed with popularity and riches, Francis had a tumultous youth, with bouts both as a street fighter and as a soldier, and was considered to be one of the leaders of the dissident youth of the town of Assisi. While imprisoned after a battle, he had a life-altering spiritual experience which led him to a change of heart and change of life.

Upon his release, Francis gave up all material possessions, which, having come from a very wealthy family, was a large sacrifice. His mission then forward was to follow his faith, and he recognized that in order to do so, he must first rid himself of excess, of boastfullness, of ego -- traits that tyrannize our modern times as they did Francis'.

Dressed in ragged clothes, working as a brick layer, and often begging for his sustenance to survive, yet all the while preaching peace and purity, Francis' family and old friends either beheld him with great sorrow or with great embarrasment. Many even considered him a "religious nut" and treated him poorly, not understanding the depth of his calling. His father even attempted to have him imprisoned.

The Church also saw him as a threat. He was an unconventional revolutionary of sorts. His call for poverty, simplicity, and sincere love were seen as a threat to the status quo of the day.

Yet Francis' work pressed on.

By 1209 he had attracted followers and founded the Fransiscan order of brothers. In 1221 he resigned direction of the Fransiscans, but his work and his order still continue and thrive to this day.

Towards the end of his life, Francis already a frail man, was practically blind and very ill. In 1224, two years before his death, he received the stigmata, the actual wounds of Christ upon his hands. St. Francis of Assisi died on October 4th, 1226 at the age of 44 and was Canonized (made a saint) on July 16th, 1228 by Pope Gregory IX.

Cigoli [Public domain] via Wikimedia

------------------- * ---------------------

Start by doing what's necessary; then do what's possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.
-St. Francis de Assisi

It is said that St. Francis of Assisi inspired the Italian Renaissance, one of the greatest cultural revolutions the world has ever seen. His profound love for the beauty of nature sparked Italian painters to bring naturalism again into their work. His value for humanity also roused the Renaissance's own movement towards humanism. He was an inspiration in his lifetime and to consequent eras and even cultural movements as well as to modern-day heroes.

St. Francis de Assisi followed his calling gladly and without resentment. His Earthly sacrifices were not seen as a burden to him but as a natural path towards oneness with creation and the Creator. His story is perhaps most powerful in that he was a young man with every worldly thing going for him: his family was wealthy, his friends saw him as a fearless soldier, he was a natural leader, and he enjoyed the pleasures of the earth. Yet he sacrificed everything for his heartfelt beliefs and took it upon himself to care for all creation over his own well-being. By doing so, he gained much more - a profound and enchanting harmony with all creation.

He is a heroic example of sacrifice, of selflessness, of humility, and likewise, a reminder of the attainability of achieving a harmonious state of peace and unity with all creation by simply exuding love.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men. -St. Francis de Assisi Philip Fruytiers [CC BY 2.0] via Wikimedia I have been all things unholy.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Kids Book Read Aloud - The Hello, Goodbye Window by Norton Juster - Storytime With Ms. Becky

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
that if he always knew the right time to begin everything; if he knew who were the right people to listen to, and whom to avoid; and, above all, if he always knew what was the most important thing to do, he would never fail in anything he might undertake.

And this thought having occurred to him, he had it proclaimed throughout his kingdom that he would give a great reward to anyone who would teach him what was the right time for every action, and who were the most necessary people, and how he might know what was the most important thing to do.

And learned men came to the king, but they all answered his questions differently.

In reply to the first question, some said that to know the right time for every action, one must draw up in advance a table of days, months, and years, and must live strictly according to it. Only thus, said they, could everything be done at its proper time. Others declared that it was impossible to decide beforehand the right time for every action, but that, not letting oneself be absorbed in idle pastimes, one should always attend to all that was going on, and then do what was most needful. Others, again, said that however attentive the king might be to what was going on, it was impossible for one man to decide correctly the right time for every action, but that he should have a council of wise men who would help him to fix the proper time for everything.

But then again others said there were some things which could not wait to be laid before a council, but about which one had at once to decide whether to undertake them or not. But in order to decide that, one must know beforehand what was going to happen. It is only magicians who know that; and, therefore, in order to know the right time for every action, one must consult magicians.

Equally various were the answers to the second question. Some said the people the king most needed were his councilors; others, the priests; others, the doctors; while some said the warriors were the most necessary.

To the third question, as to what was the most important occupation, some replied that the most important thing in the world was science. Others said it was skill in warfare; and others, again, that it was religious worship.

, the king agreed with none of them, and gave the reward to none. But still wishing to find the right answers to his questions, he decided to consult a hermit, widely renowned for his wisdom.

The hermit lived in a wood which he never quitted, and he received none but common folk. So the king put on simple clothes and, before reaching the hermit's cell, dismounted from his horse. Leaving his bodyguard behind, he went on alone.

When the king approached, the hermit was digging the ground in front of his hut. Seeing the king, he greeted him and went on digging. The hermit was frail and weak, and each time he stuck his spade into the ground and turned a little earth, he breathed heavily.

The king went up to him and said: "I have come to you, wise hermit, to ask you to answer three questions: How can I learn to do the right thing at the right time? Who are the people I most need, and to whom should I, therefore, pay more attention than to the rest? And, what affairs are the most important and need my first attention?"

, but answered nothing. He just spat on his hand and recommenced digging.

"You are tired," said the king, "let me take the spade and work awhile for you."

"Thanks!" said the hermit, and, giving the spade to the king, he sat down on the ground.

When he had dug two beds, the king stopped and repeated his questions. The hermit again gave no answer, but rose, stretched out his hand for the spade, and said:

"Now rest awhile - and let me work a bit."

But the king did not give him the spade, and continued to dig. One hour passed, and another. The sun began to sink behind the trees, and the king at last stuck the spade into the ground, and said:

"I came to you, wise man, for an answer to my questions. If you can give me none, tell me so, and I will return home."

"Here comes someone running," said the hermit. "Let us see who it is."

The king turned round and saw a bearded man come running out of the wood. The man held his hands pressed against his stomach, and blood was flowing from under them. When he reached the king, he fell fainting on the ground, moaning feebly. The king and the hermit unfastened the man's clothing. There was a large wound in his stomach. The king washed it as best he could, and bandaged it with his handkerchief and with a towel the hermit had. But the blood would not stop flowing, and the king again and again removed the bandage soaked with warm blood, and washed and re-bandaged the wound. When at last the blood ceased flowing, the man revived and asked for something to drink. The king brought fresh water and gave it to him. Meanwhile the sun had set, and it had become cool. So the king, with the hermit's help, carried the wounded man into the hut and laid him on the bed. Lying on the bed, the man closed his eyes and was quiet; but the king was so tired from his walk and from the work he had done that he crouched down on the threshold, and also fell asleep - so soundly that he slept all through the short summer night.

When he awoke in the morning, it was long before he could remember where he was, or who was the strange bearded man lying on the bed and gazing intently at him with shining eyes.

"Forgive me!" said the bearded man in a weak voice, when he saw that the king was awake and was looking at him.

"I do not know you, and have nothing to forgive you for," said the king.

"You do not know me, but I know you. I am that enemy of yours who swore to revenge himself on you, because you executed his brother and seized his property. I knew you had gone alone to see the hermit, and I resolved to kill you on your way back. But the day passed and you did not return. So I came out from my ambush to find you, and came upon your bodyguard, and they recognized me, and wounded me. I escaped from them, but should have bled to death had you not dressed my wound. I wished to kill you, and you have saved my life. Now, if I live, and if you wish it, , and will bid my sons do the same. Forgive me!"

The king was very glad to have made peace with his enemy so easily, and to have gained him for a friend, and he not only forgave him, but said he would send his servants and his own physician to attend him, and promised to restore his property.

Having taken leave of the wounded man, the king went out into the porch and looked around for the hermit. Before going away he wished once more to beg an answer to the questions he had put. The hermit was outside, on his knees, sowing seeds in the beds that had been dug the day before.

The king approached him and said, "For the last time, I pray you to answer my questions, wise man."

"!" said the hermit, still crouching on his thin legs, and looking up at the king, who stood before him.

"How answered? What do you mean?" asked the king.

"Do you not see?" replied the hermit. "If you had not pitied my weakness yesterday, and had not dug these beds for me, but had gone your way, that man would have attacked you, and you would have repented of not having stayed with me. So the most important time was when you were digging the beds; and I was the most important man; and to do me good was your most important business. Afterwards, when that man ran to us, the most important time was when you were attending to him, for if you had not bound up his wounds he would have died without having made peace with you. So he was the most important man, and what you did for him was your most important business. Remember then: there is only one time that is important - now! It is the most important time because it is the only time when we have any power. The most necessary person is the one with whom you are, for no man knows whether he will ever have dealings with anyone else: and the most important affair is to do that person good, because for that purpose alone was man sent into this life."

Translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude; illustrated by Phillip Gneiting

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
that if he always knew the right time to begin everything; if he knew who were the right people to listen to, and whom to avoid; and, above all, if he always knew what was the most important thing to do, he would never fail in anything he might undertake.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Title: Little Mouse and the Red Wall

Author: Britta Teckentrup

Illustrator: Britta Teckentrup

Publisher: Orchard Books (2018)

"The Big Red Wall had always been there. It stretched as far as the eye could see." Little Mouse, Scaredy Cat, Old Bear, Laughing Fox, and Lion Who Had Lost His Roar live in a grey village surrounded by a large red wall. The thought of what is beyond the wall fills cat, bear and lion with fear. Mouse filled with curiosity and courage, steps beyond the wall, finding a world of beauty and freedom.

After meeting a bluebird the mouse asks why its friends won't leave the safety of their home. The bird answers, "They were looking with fear... YOU are looking with wonder. You were brave enough to find out the truth for yourself." Mouse returns to her friends and they listen as she describes the wonders beyond the wall. "One by one they walked through the wall. Only Lion stayed behind... until the day he too was ready to join Little Mouse and her friends in the land beyond the wall."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Little Mouse and the Red Wall by Britta Teckentrup - Children's Library...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Little Mouse and the Red Wall Title: Little Mouse and the Red WallAuthor: Britta TeckentrupIllustrator: Britta TeckentrupPublisher: Orchard Books (2018)ISBN: 9781408342800 "The Big Red Wall had always been there. It stretched as far as the eye could see."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A Sick Day For Amos McGee By Philip Stead

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Publisher: Andersen Press (2007)

"There was once a herd of elephants. Elephants young, elephants old, elephants tall or fat or thin. Elephants like this, that or the other, all different but all happy and all the same colour. All, that is, except Elmer." Elmer is a colourful elephant who stands out from her herd. Unhappy with being teased he changes his colour to fit in but discovers he enjoys being different. The other elephants accept Elmer for who he is and realise it is okay to be different.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Elmer by David McKee - Children's Library Lady - Picture Books

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Elmer Title: ElmerAuthor: David McKeeIllustrator: David McKeePublisher: Andersen Press (2007)ISBN: 9781842707319 'There was once a herd of elephants. Elephants young, elephants old, elephants tall or fat or thin. Elephants like this, that or the other, all different but all happy and all the same colour. All, that is, except Elmer.'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Exclamation Mark by Amy Krouse Rosenthal - Stories for Kids - Children's Books Read Along Aloud

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
I Could Do That: Ester Morris Gets Women The Vote (Accessible Preview)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'The Incredible Book Eating Boy' by Oliver Jeffers

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Back

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Name Jar  | READ ALOUD PICTURE BOOK |

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Ghost in the House - Reading a Kid's Book Out Loud

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
It's Okay to Be Different — a Read-Aloud with Todd Parr | NO SMALL MATTER

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Read Aloud of Sparrow Girl, by Sara Pennypacker.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.provider_name
Contemporary Living for Book Loving Families

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
When God Made You by Matthew Paul Turner, illustrated by David Catrow

Publisher: WaterBrook
Page: 48
Format: Hardcover
Age Range: 3 - 7 years and up
Grade Level: Preschool - 2 and up
Available for Sale: February 28, 2017

Synopsis
From early on, children are looking to discover their place in the world and longing to understand how their personalities, traits, and talents fit in. The assurance that they are deeply loved and a unique creation in our big universe is certain to help them spread their wings and fly.

Through playful, charming rhyme and vivid, fantastical illustrations, When God Made You inspires young readers to learn about their own special gifts and how they fit into God's divine plan as they grow, explore, and begin to create for themselves.

Reflection
Our family believes in the Christian faith so this book couldn't be any more perfect for us...it's so, so sweet! Told in rhyming and playful text with beautiful illustrations, When God Made You inspires young readers to learn about their own special gifts and how they fit into God's divine plan as they grow, explore, and begin to create for themselves.

Written by Matthew Paul Turner, husband of author Jessica Turner who wrote The Fringe Hours and illustrated by David Catrow, this is a book you'll definitely want to add to your bedtime story lineup. It's great for reading at the start of each day or just before bed to remind children just how special, unique, and loved they are.

An exclusive design, one God refined, you're a perfectly crafted one of a kind. 'Cause when God made you, somehow God knew that the world needed someone exactly like you.

Isn't that a great message to send to children (and adults)? Because let's be honest, sometimes we all need a reminder like this. Am I right?

I think children will love listening to the rhyming text and the way the words flow together. I like that this book uses a variety of advanced vocabulary words and phrases for the preschool crowd like: exclusive, debut, self displaying, portraying, conceived and peacemaker. These words may force some curious children (like my daughter) to probe and ask what they mean, which is a good thing.

The vivid illustrations throughout this book add a bit more to this book. Little readers will see the adorable brown-skinned protagonist, a pet cat and dog sitting in an over sized green and white polka dotted chair reading a book. The protagonist's baby sister is off to the side on the floor playing with her toys. The older girl and her dog then go on a mini adventure after leaving her baby sister and their cat behind at home. She ends up in a local park after going for a bike ride. There she encounters a distressed artist who is mourning the loss of a dead flower.

The girl picks up the artist's paintbrush and starts to paint an elaborate picture of colorful flowers and birds on the ground and in the air. Next thing you know, the girl, her dog and the artist are flying in the sky on one of the birds the girl drew. In the end, you see the girl back at home with her baby sister and their dog sitting in the same chair reading a book. Although this time the chair is different. It's decorated with the same beautiful paintings the girl drew on the ground in the park with the artist. This leads you to believe perhaps the girl started daydreaming while she was reading. Was it just her imagination? Was it part of the story she was reading to her sister? Or did it really happen? I love when the ending of a book leads to further discussion and lets you ponder or create your own interpretation.

I appreciate the author chose to write this book that celebrates each person's own special and unique gifts and talents. The fact that there is a religious component to it referencing God is an added bonus for me as it's not something you normally come across in mainstream children's picture books.

I can honestly say When God Made You fills my heart with so much gratitude and joy. It even makes me a bit teary eyed, but it doesn't make me feel sad. I get a bit emotional because it's so beautifully written. The words pierce my heart and make me immediately think about how grateful I am for my children and our perfectly imperfect little family.

This book also makes me reflect on how grateful I am for where God has brought me throughout my life thus far. It challenges me to want to continue to use my talents, passions and gifts and share them with others. It makes me want to think up even more new ideas and put them into action. It makes me want to show kindness, dream, discover, explore, have faith and love more. Did I mention how much I love this book? If this book has that type of effect on an adult, imagine how powerful it would be for children to receive these messages from an early age.

With overall themes of: God, love, individuality, self-love, empathy, kindness, creativity and imagination you really can't go wrong with this book. I think it would make a great addition to an Easter basket or makes a great gift for a christening or baby shower.

About the Author
MATTHEW PAUL TURNER is the author of sixteen books. He lives with his wife Jessica ( TheMomCreative.com, The Fringe Hours) and their three children in Nashville, TN.

About the Illustrator
DAVID CATROW is an editorial cartoonist whose vibrant illustrations have appeared in more than seventy children's books, including several New York Times bestsellers, such as I Ain't Gonna Paint No More and I Like Myself. He makes his home in Ohio with his wife, Deborah.

Your turn: Are you looking forward to reading this book with your little readers? Feel free to share in the comments.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
When God Made You by Matthew Paul Turner (A Book Review)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When God Made You by Matthew Paul Turner, illustrated by David Catrow Publisher: WaterBrook Page: 48 Format: Hardcover Age Range: 3 - 7 years and up Grade Level: Preschool - 2 and up Available for Sale: February 28, 2017 Synopsis From early on, children are looking to discover their place in the world and longing to understand how their personalities, traits, and talents fit in.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
My philosophy for a happy life | Sam Berns | TEDxMidAtlantic

# data[].attributes.body
Greta Thunberg

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
WATCH: Greta Thunberg's full speech to world leaders at UN Climate Action Summit

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Pope Francis Says God Loves 'Even The Worst Of Us' At Christmas Midnight Mass | TIME

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Actitud | Victor Küppers | TEDxAndorralaVella

# data[].attributes.body
BOYAN SLUT

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Boyan Slat (born 27 July 1994) is a Dutch inventor and entrepreneur. A former aerospace engineering student, he is the CEO of The Ocean Cleanup.

Early life

Slat was born on 27 July 1994 in Delft. He has been doing engineering projects and building things since he was two years old. He set a Guinness World Record by launching 213 water rockets simultaneously when he was 14.

Initial interest in plastic pollution

In 2011, at age 16, Slat came across more plastic than fish while diving in Greece. He decided to devote a high school project for deeper investigation into ocean plastic pollution and why it was considered impossible to clean up. He later came up with the idea to build a passive system, using the circulating ocean currents to his advantage, which he presented at a TEDx talk in Delft in 2012.

Slat discontinued his aerospace engineering studies at TU Delft, to devote his time to developing his idea. He founded The Ocean Cleanup in 2014, and shortly after, his TEDx talk went viral after being shared on several news sites.

"Technology is the most potent agent of change. It is an amplifier of our human capabilities", Slat wrote in The Economist. "Whereas other change-agents rely on reshuffling the existing building blocks of society, technological innovation creates entirely new ones, expanding our problem-solving toolbox."

The Ocean Cleanup

In 2013, Slat founded the non-profit entity The Ocean Cleanup, of which he is now the CEO. The group's mission is to develop advanced technologies to rid the world's oceans of plastic. It raised US$2.2million through a crowd funding campaign with the help of 38,000 donors from 160 countries. In June 2014, the Ocean Cleanup published a 528-page feasibility study about the project's potential. Oceanographers Kim Martini and Miriam Goldstein declared the concept infeasible in a technical critique of the feasibility study on the Deep Sea News website, which was cited by other publications, including Popular Science and The Guardian. The Guardian reported that as of March 2016, the Ocean Cleanup was continuing to test and refine the concept.

Since The Ocean Cleanup started, the organization has raised $31.5million in donations from entrepreneurs in Europe and in Silicon Valley, including Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce. By developing new designs, Slat estimates that half of the Great Pacific garbage patch will be gone within five years, at minimal costs. The project will start with one system in mid-2018 and progressively make use of additional systems until it achieves full-scale deployment by 2020.

Awards and recognition

Sailors clean a beach in Garcia.

In November 2014, Slat was awarded the Champions of the Earth award of the United Nations Environment Programme. HM King Harald of Norway awarded Slat the Young Entrepreneur Award in 2015. Forbes included Slat in their 2016 "30 under 30" list In 2016. He was selected as a Thiel Fellow, the program started in 2011 by venture capitalist and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. It gives $100,000 to entrepreneurs 22 years old and younger who have left or postponed college to work on their start-up. In February 2017, Reader's Digest appointed Slat European of the Year, and the Dutch magazine Elsevier awarded him Nederlander van het Jaar 2017 (Dutchman of the Year 2017). In May 2018, Slat was awarded the Euronews award "European Entrepreneur of the Year".

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Boyan Slat: Dutch inventor and environmentalist - Biography, Life, Family, Career, Facts, Information

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Boyan Slat (born 27 July 1994) is a Dutch inventor and entrepreneur. A former aerospace engineering student, he is the CEO of The Ocean Cleanup. Slat was born on 27 July 1994 in Delft. He has been doing engineering projects and building things since he was two years old.

# data[].attributes.body
Greta Thunberg

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Who Is Greta Thunberg?

Greta Thunberg is a Swedish climate youth activist who sparked an international movement to fight climate change beginning in 2018. With the simple message "School strike for climate" handwritten on poster board, Thunberg began skipping school on Fridays and protesting outside the Swedish Parliament. Thanks to social media, her actions have spread and influenced millions of young people all over the world to organize and protest.

Launching "Fridays For Future," Thunberg and other concerned youths throughout Europe have continued to pressure leaders and lawmakers to act on climate change through their regular walkouts. Thunberg has also traveled the world, meeting with global leaders and speaking at assemblies to demand climate solutions and a recommitment to the Paris Agreement. Recently diagnosed with Asperger's, the activist has publicly shared her views on her disorder, referring to it as her "superpower."

Thunberg was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in March 2019, and a few months later she became the youngest individual ever to be honored as Time's Person of the Year.

Early Life

Thunberg was born on January 3, 2003, in Stockholm, Sweden. Thunberg began her climate activism at age 15. Thunberg was born and raised in an artistic family. Her mother, Malena Ernman, is an opera singer, and her father, Svante Thunberg, is an actor. She has a younger sister, Beata, who is a popular singer in Sweden. Like her sister, Beata has been open about her own challenges dealing with disorders like ADHD and OCD.

Climate Activism

Thunberg was only eight when she first learned about the climate crisis. Since then, she has made efforts to lower her carbon footprint by not flying and becoming vegan and has influenced her family to do the same.

As the face of the climate youth movement, Thunberg has been invited to speak at numerous rallies including ones in Stockholm, London and Brussels. In December 2018, her speech at the United Nations COP24 in Katowice, Poland, went viral.

"You are not mature enough to tell it like is," she said at the summit, addressing the Secretary-General. "Even that burden you leave to us children. But I don't care about being popular. I care about climate justice and the living planet."

Cross-Atlantic Trip to the United States

Invited to speak at the UN Climate Action Summit in New York City, which took place in September 2019, Thunberg traveled across the Atlantic on a zero-emissions yacht, accompanied by her father and a supporting crew. Taking a little over two weeks, the yacht arrived in New York City on August 28th, and from there, Thunberg visited with President Barack Obama and later spoke before the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the House Select Committee in Washington D.C. on September 18th.

Known for her blunt speaking style, Thunberg barely spoke before the committees and instead pushed forward the latest UN report. "I don't want you to listen to me," she said. "I want you to listen to the scientists."

Historical Climate-Change Protest in NYC

Two days later on September 20th, Thunberg walked with millions of protesters in New York City to demand climate action at the New York City Global Climate Strike. The demonstration became the largest climate protest in history with a total of 4 million people marching all over the world. The next day, she spoke at the UN Youth Climate Summit.

United Nations Climate Action Summit, 'How Dare You' Speech

Although the world's eyes were already on the teen activist, her speech on September 21, 2019, at the United Nations Climate Action Summit brought headline news. Speaking before leaders, lawmakers and U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, Thunberg lambasted them with one of her most indignant speeches.

"You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I'm one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing," she said. "We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!"

Photo: LIONEL BONAVENTUREAFP via Getty Images

She added: "For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you're doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight... You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you."

Days later, Thunberg joined 15 other young climate activists to file an official complaint that five countries - Argentina, France, Germany, Brazil and Turkey - have not honored their Paris Agreement pledges and have therefore violated the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child treaty.

President Trump's Response

Thunberg's "How Dare You" speech attracted so much attention that President Donald Trump, a vehement climate change denier, felt compelled to offer a mocking tweet: "She seems like a very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future. So nice to see!" he wrote.

In response, Thunberg changed her Twitter bio temporarily, using Trump's language against him. Her profile read: "A very happy young girl looking forward to a bright and wonderful future."

COP25

In December 2019, Thunberg was among the speakers at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP25) in Madrid, Spain. She also attended another major climate demonstration in the city, telling her fellow protesters, "The hope is not within the walls of COP25; the hope is out here with you."

Nobel Peace Prize Nomination

In March 2019, Thunberg was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for her climate activism. However, she lost the award to Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed.

'Time' Person of the Year

On December 11, 2019, Thunberg was named Time magazine's Person of the Year; a month shy of her 17th birthday, she became the youngest individual to earn the honor.

"Thunberg has become the biggest voice on the biggest issue facing the planet," wrote the Time editor-in-chief. "This was the year the climate crisis went from behind the curtain to center stage, from ambient political noise to squarely on the world's agenda, and no one did more to make that happen than Thunberg.

Future Plans

Taking a year off of school to campaign for climate action, Thunberg plans to travel to Mexico, Canada and South America to meet with environmental activists and see firsthand the regions most affected by climate change.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Greta Thunberg is a Swedish climate youth activist who sparked an international movement to fight climate change beginning in 2018. With the simple message "School strike for climate" handwritten on poster board, Thunberg began skipping school on Fridays and protesting outside the Swedish Parliament.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.entities[].name
National Geographic Magazine | National Geographic