Or, for that matter, measles and rubella. #vaccine You can thank this man, Maurice R. Hilleman, who developed some 40 vaccines in his lifetime, saving millions of lives. Among the amazing stats in this piece in the New York Times this week, the strain of mumps that Dr. Hilleman collected from his daughter in 1963, and from which he produced the first successful mumps vaccine, has reduced the incidence of that viral infection to fewer than 1,000 cases a year in the United States, from 186,000.

 Designers of the new generation of innovative playgrounds contend that these collaborative free-form environments are inspiring the world’s future problem-solvers. My 7-year-old has a different spin: “Yeeeeeaahhhhhh!!!” Here’s my write-up on Designwire Daily about Rockwell Group’s latest Imagination Playground — the centerpiece of the National Building Museum’s “Play Work Build” exhibition, which opened last week. 

 When I started covering sustainable design ten years ago, Marybeth Shaw of Shaw Jelveh Design was a wonderful sherpa. It was an honor for me to pen the intro to her new portfolio. You can read more and see photos on my website, laurafisherkaiser.com.

Today is World TB Day and a good time to reflect on the many contributions of Nobel Prize winner Robert Koch (1843-1910), a poor country doctor in Germany who astounded the world on this day in 1882 by announcing he had discovered the cause of tuberculosis. At the time, TB was raging across Europe, killing one in seven people.

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