New Jersey couple rescues British family stranded at airport

New Jersey couple rescues British family stranded at airport

A New Jersey couple came to the rescue of a British family stranded at Newark airport by the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano. Don and Jeanmarie Keenan learned about the plight of the Jordan family—Mick, Jane, and their 13-year-old son, Billy—from a local newscast. “Nobody’s given us nothing,” Mick told an interviewer, saying the family was running out of money and surviving on one meal a day. Although it was past 11 p.m., Jeanmarie Kennan drove to the airport, found the Jordans, and took them home, where they stayed for several days. Keenan had no qualms about taking in strangers. “Ah, I can take ’em on,” she says. “We’re from New Jersey.”

A $3 fix to a vexing health problem

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A doctoral student at MIT has engineered a $3 fix to a vexing health problem in the developing world. Applying negative pressure—suction—to a wound speeds healing; the portable devices that perform the task cost at least $100 a day, however, and they need regular recharging, making them impractical in battered regions like Haiti and Rwanda. But a team lead by mechanical engineering student Danielle Zurovcik recently unveiled a cheap, accordion-like plastic pump that performs well in the field. The devices are also easy to make, so they can be manufactured locally in many poor countries.

Veteran and Holocaust survivor team up to teach about World War II

An American World War II veteran and a Holocaust survivor have teamed up to teach college students about the war. Former Army medic Buster Simmons, 87, first encountered Micha Tomkiewicz, then just 6 years old, aboard a train crammed with 3,000 prisoners from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. They met again through a blog set up to reunite soldiers and camp survivors, and this week they addressed students at College of the Ozarks in Missouri. Simmons says the most important lesson they have to teach is one of freedom. “We’ve never been anything but free here,” Simmons says. “Their total freedom was gone.”