It's your first day at Magnificent Marigold's Magical Macademy. But before you can learn your first spell you must get through the sorting ceremony. And the sorting hat has chosen you for a special challenge. The Macademy had 8 founders...

The year is 1400 BCE. At the temple of the fisherman, the morning is unusually still and this is just the latest in a series of troubling signs for Quexo, the village shaman. The villagers live off the sea, but this year the winds have...

If it seems like friendships formed in adolescence are particularly special, that's because they are. Childhood, adolescent, and adult friendships all manifest differently in part because the brain works in different ways at those stages...

In the court of the Jade Emperor, a young princess had a special skill: she could pluck clouds from the sky and spin them into the softest robes. But her craft was the same day after day, and she longed for new inspiration. So the Queen...

The dwarves were master craftspeople. One dwarf, Andvari, forged marvelous creations. He often took the form of a fish and, one day, he swam to the land of the water nymphs, who guarded mounds of gold. When the nymphs laughed at his...

In the early 20th century, pregnancy testing required a slippery piece of equipment: a female African clawed frog. For decades, hospitals and research labs had a trusted supply of these handy creatures, employing their help in testing...

Beneath your ribs, you'll find, among other things, the pancreas -- an organ that works a lot like a personal health coach. Emma Bryce explains how this organ controls your sugar levels and produces a special juice that releases the...

Sadie Guthrie, a special education teacher at Lawton Alternative School in San Francisco, uses a mobile coffee cart to teach her students real world skills and an entire school about compassion. Class Act is a new series sponsored by the...

The first day of school is an important moment for teachers and students. For first-year teachers like Michelle, a recent NYU School of Education graduate, this day holds even more meaning.



Watch as Michelle describes her...

The starving orphan seeking a second helping of gruel. The spinster wasting away in her tattered wedding dress. The stone-hearted miser plagued by the ghost of Christmas past. More than a century after his death, these remain...

Have you ever come across an oddly stretched image on the sidewalk, only to find that it looks remarkably realistic if you stand in exactly the right spot? These sidewalk illusions employ a technique called anamorphosis - a special case...

About 10,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers, aided by rudimentary agriculture, moved to semi-permanent villages and never looked back. With further developments came food surpluses, leading to commerce, specialization and, many years later...

From robots to braces to the Mars Rover, see how a special kind of metal called shape memory alloys advance technology in everyday ways that we don't always realize.

All year long, researchers at hospitals around the world collect samples from flu patients and send them to top virology experts with one goal: to design the vaccine for the next flu season. But why do we need a new one every year?...

Time travel is a staple of science fiction stories, but is it actually possible? It turns out nature does allow a way of bending time, an exciting possibility suggested by Albert Einstein when he discovered special relativity over one...

Nearly 350 species of fish have specialized anatomical structures that generate and detect electrical signals. Underwater, where light is scarce, electrical signals offer ways to communicate, navigate, find, and sometimes stun prey. But...

Within every cell in our body, two copies of a tumor suppressor gene called BRCA1 are tasked with regulating the speed at which cells divide. Michael Windelspecht explains how these genes can sometimes mutate, making those cells less...

Water is a special substance for several reasons, and you may have noticed an important one right in your cold drink: ice. Solid ice floats in liquid water, which isn't true for most substances. But why? George Zaidan and Charles Morton...

Why does the Earth spin? Does a basketball falling from a spinning merry-go-round fall in a curve, as it appears to, or in a straight line? How can speed be manipulated while spinning? In short, why is the spinning motion so special?...

A mother and son trek across an endless desert. Wearing special suits to dissipate heat and recycle moisture, the travelers aren’t worried about dying of thirst. Their fears are much greater. Soon, the sound of the desert is drowned out...

On first glance, the painting Las Meninasc (The Maids of Honorc) might not seem terribly special, but it's actually one of the most analyzed pieces in the history of art. Why is this painting by Diego Velazquez so captivating? James...

What's so special about Leonard da Vinci's Vitruvian Man? With arms outstretched, the man fills the irreconcilable spaces of a circle and a square -- symbolizing the Renaissance-era belief in the mutable nature of humankind. James Earle...

"The beauty of sports for anybody, disabled or not, is that it allows you to lose yourself in something."



This quote from one of the many challenged athletes in this story, is born from their desire and...

** OGTV's first GOOD STORY of the week is about a young man from Boston who, when faced with a crossroads in his life, chose to follow his passion for art and the guidance of his mentor. **



Art...