Mark Ray

Influencers — people with the power to affect others’ attitudes and purchasing decisions — have been around forever. Pope Francis has even called the Virgin Mary the first influencer. But the influencer industry has really come of age with the rise of social media.

Last fall, retail behemoth Walmart opened a health center at its store in Dallas, GA, the first of a string of clinics designed to offer convenient, affordable healthcare. When Walmart needed help designing the customer experience, it turned to MOFI, a boutique consulting firm based in Cincinnati.

Pueblo, Colo. guitarist and singer Tom Munch has performed everywhere from restaurants to dude ranches to the Royal Gorge Bridge, but nursing home concerts take up much of his time, accounting for 50 gigs a month. That all changed in March, as COVID-19 forced senior living facilities across the country to take ever more stringent steps to keep their residents safe.

He’s been called Patient Zero, but his real name was Emile Ouamouno. He was two years old, he lived in the Guinean farming village of Meliandou and he loved listening to his family’s bright red portable radio. Emile died in December 2013, the first victim of an

Ebola outbreak that would quickly spread across Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone and other countries in 2014. Ebola eventually claimed 11,325 victims, including Emile’s mother, grandmother and three-year-old sister, all of who died within a month of the young boy.

Prostate cancer grows so slowly in some men that doctors often recommend active surveillance or watchful waiting instead of more aggressive treatment. In fact, one study from the Johns Hopkins Active Surveillance Program found that less than 1% of men with low-risk prostate cancer developed metastatic disease after 15 years of active surveillance. But if prostate cancer grows slowly, the same can’t be said for research into the disease.

Are you a comfort giver or a flu giver? That’s the question the UK’s South West Yorkshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust recently posed in a series of advertisements targeting its employees. In one advert, an elderly woman reaches out to a nurse, who shares a smile — and perhaps the flu virus. In another, a boy tightly hugs the neck of a caregiver who may well be infected even though she shows no symptoms.

Joel Sartore (Eagle Class of 1977) is an overachiever. Like most concerned citizens, he wants to save the whales and the giant pandas. But he also wants to save the Florida grasshopper sparrow. And the Colombian spider monkey. And the hellbender. And even the homely Sunda pangolin, which looks like a dinosaur that didn’t get the memo about extinction.

After backpacking, canoeing and cycling 67 miles over the past week, the 13-year-old Scout, along with the other members of Troop 141 from Christiansburg, Va., had to get up at 4 a.m. to pedal another 38 miles into Washington, D.C. That was 8 more miles than they’d planned (due to a monsoon-shortened ride the day before) and 7 more miles than Dallas thought he could handle.

During CES 2020 in Las Vegas in January, more than 4,400 companies debuted some 20,000 tech products, everything from 8K TVs to foldable laptop computers to plant-based pork from the people who brought you the Impossible Burger. Aside from the robotic puppies, Bluetooth-equipped shower heads and robot warrior gaming helmets featured, many of the new products could be useful to people who are around the same age as CES, which debuted in 1967.

Pastor Larry Stoess and his wife, Kathie, create community one meal at a time.

When Carla Sofka’s mother died just before Thanksgiving 2017, Sofka didn’t immediately post the news on social media. She was busy planning the funeral, making travel arrangements and getting an obituary ready for the weekly newspaper in her mother’s community.

While opioid abuse is not as large an issue outside the U.S., it could easily become a major problem without the right guardrails in place.

What can we learn from the U.S. pain addiction epidemic and the crisis response measures being implemented? And what preventative measures, and checks and balances are in place in countries around the world to help avoid a repeat of the crisis?

Tens of thousands of Scouts and Scouters from around the globe will attend this summer’s World Scout Jamboree at the Summit Bechtel Reserve in West Virginia.
But international Scouts and Scouters have been coming to America since the BSA’s earliest days, bringing with them ideas and traditions that have made the BSA better.

Pick up a bottle of the new Kirkland Signature™ Local Raw Unfiltered Honey, and
you’ll see just one ingredient on the label. (Honey, of course.) But there’s more inside that bottle. Depending on where you live, you’ll also find a taste of your own backyard.

The ongoing debate over whether to remove Confederate statues in the South (and beyond) demonstrates how public art highlights what a society finds significant. By that measure, Ed Hamilton was pretty insignificant when he was growing up black in the 1950s and 1960s.