This story originally appeared on The Nib and is reprinted here with permission.
This story originally appeared on The Nib and is reprinted here with permission.
From Pakistan to Tanzania, the most effective education solutions are community-led. Here’s how local leaders, in partnership with Malala Fund and supported by Pura, are mobilizing entire communities.
When asked to describe what Tanzania smells like, Grace Isekore closes her eyes and breathes in deep. For a moment, she’s somewhere else entirely. Tanzania is a rich tapestry of sights and scents, from the smell of sea mist that permeates the coastline to the earthy cardamom and cloves she cooks with in her kitchen. But when Grace emerges from her reverie, her answer is unexpected.
“Tanzania smells like peace,” she says, her eyes still closed. “I see a beautiful country where we are free to move, free to speak. And there is peace within the community.”
For Grace, that sense of peace isn’t just something she smells; it’s something she works toward every day. As a project coordinator with Pastoral Women’s Council (PWC), a women-led organization that empowers pastoralist communities in northern Tanzania, she has seen firsthand how girls flourish when they have the opportunity to attend school. Like scent, education not only connects girls to their own culture, but also helps broaden their horizons, realizing new possibilities for themselves and others. That transformation reshapes entire communities and ripples outward, with the potential to change countries and transform the world for the better.

For Grace and others around the world, education is freedom, as well as a pathway to a stronger community. Rooted in that shared belief, Pura, a home fragrance company, was inspired to build on their four-year partnership with Malala Fund to create something truly unique: a fragrance collection that connects people through scent to communities in Tanzania, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Brazil, where barriers to girls’ education are among the highest.
Using ingredients from each region, the new Pura x Malala Fund Collection uses scent to transport people to these regions directly. “Future in Bloom,” for example, invokes Pakistan’s lush valleys through notes of jasmine, cedarwood, and mango; while Tanzania’s fragrance, “Heart on Fire,” evokes the spirit and joyfulness of the girls who live there through cardamom, lemon, and green tea.
The new Collection honors the work Malala Fund does every day, partnering with locally-led organizations in these four countries to ensure every girl can access and complete 12 years of education. Each scent celebrates the joy, tenacity, and courage of the women and girls driving change on the ground, while also augmenting Pura’s annual grant to Malala Fund by donating eight percent of net revenue from the Pura x Malala Fund Collection to Malala Fund directly.
Just as each country’s scent is unique, so too are their needs related to education. But with support from Malala Fund and Pura, local leaders are coming up with creative ways to mobilize entire communities (parents, teachers, elders, and the students themselves, in their pursuit of solutions, understanding that educating girls helps everyone thrive. Here’s how their efforts are creating real, durable impact in Tanzania and Pakistan, and creating a ripple effect that changes the world for the better.

Northern Tanzania, Grace’s home, is home to pastoralist communities like the Maasai, a nomadic people who have moved with the seasons to nurture the land and care for their livestock for centuries. The nomadic nature of this lifestyle creates significant and unique barriers to girls’ education. Longstanding gender roles have enabled Maasai to survive in the harsh environment and have placed great value on both women and men. Over time, as nomadic life has been threatened by the privatization of land and stationary education models have been implemented, the reality of pastoralist livelihood has shifted and introduced new complexities. Now, the sheer distance to schools is both a practical challenge and one that often comes with danger from the landscape, predators, and potential exposure to assault along the journey. Girls shoulder the responsibility of household chores and there is often cultural pressure around early marriage – both leading to boys’ education being prioritized over girls’.
“There are very, very good [pastoralist] cultural practices, which are passed from generation to generation,” says Janet Kimori, an English teacher at Lekule Girls Secondary School in Longido, Tanzania. But when cultural practices act as educational barriers, “you have to sit down and look for where you are going to assist. As a school, as an individual, the school administration—all of us will chip in and know how we are going to deal with this problem.”
PWC works to ensure girls are able to exercise their right to an education while also preserving pastoralist culture. One successful approach, the organization found, has been the formation of Parent Teacher Associations (PTAs), created with help from Malala Fund. In PTA meetings, students, parents, teachers, elders, and government officials meet, discuss educational barriers, and come up with community-led solutions that preserve and honor their culture while advancing educational outcomes.

One recent PTA meeting highlights how these community-led solutions are often the most effective. At Lekule Girls Secondary School, the lack of fresh water forces girls to walk long distances to collect water for the school’s kitchen during the school day, and these long journeys not only disrupt class time but can leave girls vulnerable to sexual assault in isolated areas. Through facilitated discussion, PTA members landed on a solution: installing a borehole to pipe in fresh water to the school. Reliable access to water creates a better learning environment for the girls, but it also benefits the community at large, as local governments are then more likely to invest in health clinics and other community resources nearby.
With a solution in place, the PTA was then able to discuss ideas and map out a course of action. The women would raise money for the cost of the borehole, while the men would recruit workers to dig the hole and lay the pipe. Together, they would ask government officials to match their investment.
The benefits of PTA meetings within the pastoralist communities are undeniable. “The girls are talking and addressing issues in a confident way, and parents feel they are part of the resource team to solve challenges happening at school,” Grace says. One unexpected benefit: The larger cultural impact these PTA meetings have created. Thanks to the success of PTAs within pastoralist communities, the models are now being endorsed on a national level, and schools across Tanzania are starting to use them to solve problems in their own communities. When a community creates opportunities for girls to learn, everyone benefits.

A continent away in Pakistan, the country’s northernmost region of Gilgit-Baltistan seems like a land untouched by time. The region’s looming mountains, snow-capped peaks, lush valleys and crystalline lakes draw nature lovers and landscape photographers from around the world, but living among this kind of breathtaking scenery has its drawbacks. Schools in the region are few and far between, and the area’s harsh climate often makes roads inaccessible for travel. Poverty and gender-based discrimination are additional obstacles, making school even further out of reach, and girls are affected disproportionately. Going up against these barriers requires a persistent, quiet strength that’s found in the women who live there and reflected in Pakistan’s signature scent.
Saheli Circles are how local leaders in Gilgit-Baltistan are bridging the gap between girls and education. An Urdu term for “female friend,” Saheli Circles are after-school safe spaces where girls explore subjects like art and climate change, while also developing skills that help them manage emotions, set goals, and build positive relationships. Girls study in groups, visit the library, play sports, and tackle filmmaking and photography projects, all designed to develop self confidence and teach the girls how to advocate for issues that matter to them. But the work doesn’t stop there.
“What we’re trying to achieve here will only be impactful if it trickles down to the home environment and the school environment,” says Marvi Sumro, founder and program director of Innovate, Educate, and Inspire Pakistan (IEI), the local organization that developed the Saheli Circles model and partnered with Malala Fund in 2021 to make it a reality. Ever since, Saheli Circles have grown to involve teachers, elders, and parents to encourage relationship building that’s essential for young girls and adolescents. “Our spaces can give mothers and daughters an opportunity to interact a little differently—do an art activity, or have a cup of tea together, or some good conversation,” Marvi says.
The relationship building is what makes the biggest positive impact throughout the community. Recently, one Saheli Circle was able to bring together parents, teachers, and administrators to advocate for better education at their local school, and together they convinced the department of education to hire a science teacher. Another Saheli Circle organized a fund where members of the community can contribute monthly to pay for uniforms, books, and other school expenses for the girls in their village, eliminating those small, hidden costs that are often a barrier to education for many. A third Saheli Circle was able to produce a short film about how gender-based household chores can take away valuable study time from girls, leaving them at a disadvantage. “The girls put the film together and showed it to the mothers, and the response from the mothers was just beautiful,” Marvi says.

The education and relationship building that the girls receive in Saheli Circles connects them to larger opportunities and economic freedom that are not possible in their hometown. “For girls in Gilgit-Baltistan, education is extremely important because of the fact that we’re so far away from where the economy is, where the opportunity is. Education becomes this bridge for us, for our girls, to access all the opportunity and economy that exists in [larger cities].”
From rural Tanzania to remote Pakistan, local organizations prove every day that prioritizing girls’ education benefits everyone. Communities that lift up girls are able to secure resources like clean water and well-staffed schools, as well as build stronger relationships.
These outcomes are only possible because of the women and girls who work tirelessly in these regions to overcome barriers and drive progress. The Pura x Malala Fund Collection is a way to honor them, celebrate their achievements, and unite people the world over around a shared belief that education is freedom. Like scent, that belief can build, travel, and has the possibility to transform the world.
Experience the Pura x Malala Fund Collection here, and connect with the stories of real girls leading change across the globe.
If you’ve got red, itchy eyes, you might just have the (totally made up) “Bixonimania”
There have been a lot of dubious medical research papers published over the years. Famously, there was the 1998 case series that kicked off what would become an entire movement of vaccine skepticism by falsely linking them to autism. Before that, there was a whole slew of research bought and paid for by the sugar industry designed to “downplay the risks of sugar and highlight the hazards of fat,” according to NPR.
Rarely, however, are studies so heavily, and intentionally, fictionalized as a paper that quietly popped up in some small corners of the Internet in early 2024.
Almira Osmanovic Thunström, medical researcher at the University of Gothenburg, knew that Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, Google Gemini, etc. draw from an expansive knowledge base they’re trained on.
Training data can include anything and everything from books to Reddit posts to song lyrics to articles published in reputable medical journals.
Crucially, hundreds of millions of people log into these AI services every year to ask about symptoms and receive medical advice. It’s the natural evolution of the “Just check WebMD” approach. Thunström wanted to see if she could effect the output of these LLMs by planting bogus ideas into their training data.
So, she made up a disease. She called it “Bixonimania,” which includes symptoms such as sore, itchy eyes and discolored eyelids. Then, she fabricated an entire research study around the condition and uploaded a “preprint” of the paper to a couple of servers—a preprint being a version of the research paper that has not yet undergone peer review, but is still made available for the public to read.

Finally, with the seeds planted, and the false study publicly available for anyone (or anything) to see, Thunström waited to see if LLMs would begin spitting out “Bixonimania” as a diagnosis.
If the experiment sounds ethically dubious, that’s fair, but Thunström made every effort to make it clear that the findings were completely false. Not only did she collaborate heavily with an ethics consultant on the experiment, she left plenty of breadcrumbs along the way.
For starters, the lead author of the study is listed as “Lazljiv Izgubljenovic,” a person who does not exist. Translated from Slovenian, the name means “The Lying Loser.”
Second was the name of the disease itself, which was chosen to be ridiculous sounding. “I wanted to be really clear to any physician or any medical staff that this is a made-up condition, because no eye condition would be called mania—that’s a psychiatric term,” Thunström said per Nature.com.
Early in the paper, the text “this entire paper is made up,” appears. As does a note that all of the fifty so-called “participants” were completely fictional. Toward the end, Thunström thanks such esteemed colleagues as “Professor Maria Bohm at The Starfleet Academy … onboard the USS Enterprise” and partners like “the Professor Sideshow Bob Foundation.”
Despite the warnings, and the fact that (nearly) any qualified human reading the paper would know it was a fake, it began showing up in search results and even had the authority to appear on Google Scholar.
AI chatbots began spitting out “Bixonimania” as a possible diagnosis to users within just a few weeks—users who were probably suffering from eye irritation due to too much screen exposure. Thunström even has the screenshots to prove that certain models, including Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini, still refer to the disease as a “recently” proposed or described condition.
Then something even stranger happened.
The “Bixonimania” paper was never peer-reviewed or published in an official journal, for obvious reasons. But, soon enough, it was referenced and cited in a new paper that was peer-reviewed.
“Bixonimania is an emerging form of POM [periorbital melanosis] linked to blue light exposure; further research on the mechanism is underway,” the authors confidently wrote.
The papers referencing the made-up disease were later retracted.
The TL;DR? People rarely read beyond the headline. In fact, one study (a real one!) found that more than 75% of people who share an article online haven’t even read it. Most of us trust anything that appears in a medical journal.
You’d think physicians and researchers would be more thorough, but the truth is they’re just as susceptible to time crunches, lapses of focus, and even taking shortcuts in their work from time to time. In other words, they’re only human.
This fascinating experiment isn’t just about how a researcher managed to fool AI, it speaks to bigger problems with how we use the technology and our daily media habits.
“The solution isn’t just better filters. It’s better habits, better norms, and better expectations around how we read, verify and cite. Human‑centred resilience has to come first,” an astute commenter wrote.
“This expose has huge implications for academia and ‘googling your symptoms’. I was/am worried about being the one taking the hit for a controversial experiment of this sort. It was done with very high guardrails and ethical considerations, I hope everyone reading will take that in to account,” Thunström elaborated on LinkedIn.
She recently decided to retract the papers and keep them private somewhere curious users can read them, but they’ll no longer be crawled by LLMs.

“The bixonimania experiment was never about exposing LLMs as flawed tools, or arguing they have no place in medicine. They do. It was about demonstrating that any system can be infiltrated and that researchers who blindly cite AI-generated references really should read what they’re quoting. I know this firsthand,” she says in another LinkedIn post, adding that she herself has been duped by AI-generated summaries of her own research papers.
“The failure wasn’t the system. It was how I used it.”
It’s been 23 years since we lost these brave souls, but David M. Brown’s message remains timeless.
On February 1, 2003, a tragic reminder of how delicate life is struck those watching the landing of Space Shuttle Columbia (STS-107). Commander Rick D. Husband, Pilot William C. “Willie” McCool, and mission specialists David M. Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Michael P. Anderson, Laurel B. Clark, and Ilan Ramon were selected for Columbia’s 28th mission. The mission involved orbiting Earth while conducting experimental research.
What they didn’t know was that, during liftoff, a piece of insulation foam had compromised one of the shuttle’s heat shields. Upon reentry, with just 16 minutes remaining before they were expected to touch down, the shuttle met its fatal end.

Many have recently taken a renewed interest in astrophysics, inspired by the awe of the Artemis II mission. Astronauts who devote their lives to space exploration are nothing short of magnificent. It’s a pursuit defined by equal parts devotion, incredible bravery, and the ability to see the big picture, quite literally. As astronaut Neil Armstrong famously put it, even “small steps” in this realm are “giant leaps for mankind,” a reminder of the importance of perspective within the smallest scientific details.
Mission specialist Brown had sent an email just one day before the crew was set to land, and his aerial view of our tiny blue marble of a planet clearly gave him perspective.
A Reddit user who said they were related to Brown shared the email and wrote, “I had a family member on Columbia, Dave Brown. We were at the launch and the disaster was put in a very different perspective for us, even though I didn’t know him that well. He emailed the family regularly and the day before reentry sent a very impactful email to us that became much more so after the incident.”
The email read:
“Friends,
It’s hard to believe but I’m coming up on 16 days in space and we land tomorrow.
I can tell you a few things:
Floating is great – at two weeks it really started to become natural. I move much more slowly as there really isn’t a hurry. If you go too fast then stopping can be quite awkward. At first, we were still handing each other things, but now we pass them with just a little push.
We lose stuff all the time. I’m kind of prone to this on Earth, but it’s much worse here as I can now put things on the walls and ceiling too. It’s hard to remember that you have to look everywhere when you lose something, not just down.
The views of the Earth are really beautiful. If you’ve ever seen a space IMAX movie that’s really what it looks like. What really amazes me is to see large geographic features with my own eyes. Today, I saw all of Northern Libya, the Sinai Peninsula, the whole country of Israel, and then the Red Sea. I wish I’d had more time just to sit and look out the window with a map but our science program kept us very busy in the lab most of the time.
The science has been great and we’ve accomplished a lot. I could write more about it but that would take hours.
My crewmates are like my family – it will be hard to leave them after being so close for 2 1/2 years.
My most moving moment was reading a letter Ilan brought from a Holocaust survivor talking about his seven-year-old daughter who did not survive. I was stunned such a beautiful planet could harbor such bad things. It makes me want to enjoy every bit of the Earth for how great it really is.
I will make one more observation – if I’d been born in space I know I would desire to visit the beautiful Earth more than I’ve ever yearned to visit space. It is a wonderful planet.
Dave”
While these precious lives were ended far too soon, their work was not in vain. NASA was able to salvage much of the data collected during the mission.
One of many examples was video footage that appeared to show a new, unexplained lightning-like phenomenon. In an article for New Scientist, Maggie McKee explains that researchers who pored over the footage saw a reddish glow unlike anything astrophysicists had seen at the time: “The glow occurred about 150 kilometres above the ocean near Madagascar and does not appear to be linked with thunderstorms.”
Similar to the tragic end of the Space Shuttle Challenger (STS-51L) mission, astrophysicists, as all good scientists do, find a way to carry on. They use these experiences to deepen their understanding and to advance science beyond what once seemed possible. In the words of Isaac Newton, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
Ever wake up in the morning, and you’re not sure what you want to get out of the day?
Ever wake up in the morning unsure of what you want to get out of the day? One day rolls into the next, and it’s easy to lose track of time and go on through our daily routines without any real purpose. That’s why, if we want to achieve our dreams and live the best life possible, it’s important to have a clear idea of what we’re working towards and to affirm it every morning.
Dr. Cindra Kamphoff, a certified mental performance coach who has worked with the Minnesota Vikings, USA Track & Field, and several Fortune 100 and 500 companies, created a 4-minute practice you can do every morning to have a successful day. She calls it the GRIT morning routine. “This simple GRIT routine gets my day started on the right foot!” she wrote on LinkedIn.
To perform the GRIT routine, Kamphoff says that you should focus for one minute on each of the following:
“For one minute, remind yourself what you’re grateful for, the good things and the tough things,” she said in a YouTube video. Kamphoff told CNBC to envision a highlight reel of everything that has shaped your path. Think about the people you love, the blessings you’ve had in life, and the challenges that you’ve overcome to be the person you are today.
Gratitude is extremely important because it’s at the root of living a satisfied life. If you don’t appreciate the things you have in life, then it’s almost like not having them at all. A 2024 Harvard study found that gratitude is associated with greater emotional well-being, lower risk of depression, better sleep and heart health, and may even extend people’s lives.

“R is remember your purpose, or your ‘why.’ For one minute, remember and remind yourself why you do what you do,” Kamphoff says. If you haven’t found a specific purpose yet, that’s okay. Your purpose can be as lofty as creating a great movement that changes the world or as small as learning to be 1% kinder every day. Mark Manson, author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, says that finding purpose may feel overwhelming, so it’s best to boil it down to a simple question: “What can I do with my time that is important?”
“For one minute, state at least three intentions. These are the ways you want to show up today, less about what you want to do but who you want to be,” Kamphoff says. She says to consider “who you want to be” and how you “want to show up” in the world, whether at home or at the office. Some examples include: “I will be a more patient parent” or “I will do everything in my power to avoid being distracted.”
“The last step is T, which is to talk to yourself powerfully. For one minute, tell yourself who you really are,” she says. She suggests that people talk to themselves with statements that include “I will,” “I can,” or “I am,” she told CNBC. If you are going to a job as a teacher, tell yourself, “I am the best teacher these kids have ever had,” or if you have a mile-long to-do list, tell yourself, “I can accomplish everything on my list and more.”
As the great Taoist philosopher Lao Tzu once said, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.” Every morning, we begin our own journey, and the most important thing is to take that step in the right direction. With the GRIT morning ritual, hopefully, finding that direction and staying on the path is a lot easier.
Bertha Benz embarked a 60-mile journey that would later become the world’s first road trip.
German engineer Karl Benz is generally credited with inventing the modern car, patenting his three-wheeled “Benz Patent-Motorwagen” on January 29, 1886. However, not many know that his wife played a key part in bringing it to the mainstream. She’s also technically the world’s first car thief…before the word “car” even existed.
Bertha Benz was a constant supporter of her husband’s idea: using her dowry to back him financially and even offering her own input to make the contraption more practical. Her input was most impressive, considering women weren’t allowed to formally study engineering at the time.

Some religious groups even associated it with witchcraft or the devil. This unfortunately took a lot of the wind out of Karl’s sails.
So, in the wee hours of August 5, 1888, she set out in secret with her two young sons, Eugen and Richard Benz. She left Karl a note saying that the trio had ventured to her mother’s home, around 60 miles away. She had failed to mention that she’d be using their automobile to get there.
Luckily, Bertha was nothing if not resourceful. When a fuel pipe got clogged, she cleared it with a hatpin. She used a garter as insulation material for a frayed ignition lead. When the wooden brakes began to fail, Benz had a cobbler install leather, making the world’s first pair of brake linings. When the automobile ran low on petrol, she even stopped at a pharmacy to purchase a petroleum-based cleaning agent and use that as fuel. This essentially created the world’s first gas station.
Despite these challenges, Bertha made it to her destination twelve hours later. It was only then that she sent Karl a telegram sharing the details of her clandestine excursion. Relieved, Karl urged Bertha to rush the car’s chains back on a freight train to be shown at a car show. Instead, she drove it right back home.
And yet, despite her remarkable contributions, she wouldn’t be inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame until 2016. Meanwhile, Karl was inducted in 1984, a good 32 years before her.
In 2019, Mercedes-Benz released an ad that cinematically imagined what Bertha’s journey must have been like. How she must have appeared like a supernatural being to those who had never seen an automobile, how she surely endured sexist comments, and (perhaps most importantly) how inspiring she might have looked to young girls who witnessed her bravery.
The ad ends with: “She believed in more than a car. She believed in herself,” which feels like a little more than sensational marketing. As Bertha did famously say, “Before me, no automobile existed.”
Even though we don’t hear their stories as often, history is full of women just like Bertha. Women who believed in themselves enough to ignore the odds and change the world forever.