While the news is usually focused on hate, corruption, and crime, not all is lost. While your favorite politician was busy mourning the mysterious death of the investigative journalist who was about to publish a damning exposé, everyday heroes were at work.

• Bud May and the Wicker Family

Our story begins in Roscoe, Illinois. Kylie Wicker was born without fingers on her left hand and her parents' benevolent insurance company only offered to pay for one prosthetic in her lifetime. Her parents had a heartbreaking decision to make: let her live with fingers now and lose them later, or wait until she is an adult so that her fingers would last beyond the next growth spurt. Being without any positive choices, they decided to wait until Kylie was done growing to get the prosthetic. Instead of the natural response, homicidal rage, her parents took to the internet to find out what other families were doing. Her parents found that 3-D printing could now print prosthetic limbs, but that the costs were still astronomical. They emailed local schools to ask if their students could take on the project. The first two schools declined.

Enter the engineering graphics class at Boylan Catholic High School. The class' teacher, Bud May, accepted the challenge and met Kylie's parents to iron out details. The final product would be challenging: approximately 30 pieces that had to be responsive, durable, movable, and mimic the human hand. It would need to be significantly better than previous bionic hands. Bud and 10 students jumped at the challenge and got to work. While many of us spent our technology classes dying of dysentery and watching our oxen drown, this class was making Kylie's life unimaginably better.

For roughly $5, or less than many people pay every morning to an internationally traded, 21,000 store corporation doing business in 64 countries and charging you airport prices for banana bread while often killing business for local cafés (As long as the money doesn't go to McDonald's! Grrrr!), this class built a prosthetic hand for Kylie. The hand has been successful and Kylie is now enjoying playing with dolls and riding her bike. Some may ask why the lazy class printed a hand instead of a vital organ for someone in need, the answer is simple: common core is at fault.

In summary, Bud and his students are heroes: they made Kylie's life unimaginably better, saved her family tens of thousands of dollars, and showed others how cheaply and easily this can be done. Despite everything given to her, Kylie was not the only winner in this story. Bud and his class will forever know that they helped give Kylie a normal childhood and have this amazing experience to springboard them into adulthood or something.

Read the original story here

Until next week, may all your dreams come true.

Some of you have no idea or don't care about Snapchat, but anyone under 30 will find this interesting. The photo messaging app has had a rep for users sending lewd images to a control list of contacts, but it's has grown into a new method of communication between friends and enemies. Users send images or videos that are visible for up to 10-seconds before they disappear to Snapchat heaven.

The user experience is about to change, again. After today, Snapchaters will have the ability to send text messages and live face-to-face chatting.

Here's the official announcement for the Snapchat Tumblr:

Building Snapchat has taught us a lot about what makes conversation special. When we first started working on an application for sharing disappearing pictures, we had no idea how much we would learn. Our classmates were quick to point out that you could always take a screenshot. That led us to the notion of deletion by default — you keep what you want, and we’ll get rid of everything else!

We also learned that conversation feels better when it’s visual. So we decided to make sure that every time you launch Snapchat we take you straight to the camera. It’s the fastest way to capture and share a moment on your smartphone.

With our last product update, we honored the true nature of storytelling — every Story has a chronological order — a beginning, middle, and end. We built Stories to help Snapchatters create narratives and share them with all of their friends in just one tap.

The hover-board Marty McFly road in the 1989 film, "Back to the Future II," is no longer believed to be science fiction based on a video that has gained a lot of attention on the Internet this week featuring a familiar cast from the future along with celebrity demonstrations from Tony Hawk, Moby, Terrell Owens, Schoolboy Q and Agnes Bruckner.

Christopher Lloyd, also known as Dr. Emmett Brown the mad-time-traveling scientist that invented the flux capacitor came back in the DeLorean to remind us that the technology required to make hover-boards 25 years ago was an impossibility.

"Thanks to the clever folks with HUVrTech the technology has caught up with the concept," he says.

The video was filmed in downtown Los Angeles in February 2014 and claims, "The following demonstrations are completely real."

Then Tony Hawk, Moby, Terrell Owens, Schoolboy Q and Agnes Bruckner hover around showing how apparently easy they are to ride.

"Hovering this way feels like skateboarding in its purest form. Because theres no friction below you it lets you focus on the pure essence," Tony Hawk said.

The hover-board is made of two machined pieces of paramagnetic titanium giving it the strength-to-weight ratio needed to lift off the ground. It has a 180 degree rotating footpad to give the rider an optimal stance. The HUVr App, coming soon to Androids and iPhones, is your board's control center that allows you to track your your paths, distance, speed and travel time and share it to social media.

Mark Cuban is on board. "Once in a rare while do you get the chance to be part of something this big. This is one of those times. I've never been so excited for a product I've invested in. This (fleeting expletive) this is going to change the world!," he said on the HUVrTech homepage.

For some bros it can be extremely tasking to adequately balance their time between their girlfriends and bro activities like lifting, video games, broing out, and chilling with the bros. This is a common bro-blem. Bros genuinely cares about their partner but for some reason sometimes accidentally forget to talk to her all day.

Luckily fellow bros share your pain and created the BroApp to bring an end to this bro-lemma.

With BroApp, you can spend as much time with the bros as you want while pre-selected thoughtful, sweet, and heart-felt text messages are sent through the app to your girlfriend during times of your choice that remind her you're always thinking about her.

Texts include:
Hey babe, how was your day?
:x
Hey babe, what are you up to tonight?
Miss you :)
Hey babe, i'm leaving work now

If the bros who created the BroApp didn't properly capture the way you communicate with your girlfriend (or lack there of), you have the option of customizing and adding your own messages.

Every bro surely knows the importance of not getting caught in the act, which is why the app also has certain safeguards preventing your girlfriend from ever knowing.

You can choose which Wi-Fi networks are not bro-friendly so the app doesn't send her an automatic text when your both on the couch at her house. Also the bros claim they have a way to disguise the BroApp on your phone so she can never detect it.

As always bros prevail for their fellow bros and the BroApp is here to help any member of the bro community who need bro-sisstance.

Save money on food and at local attractions by downloading the Weekly's "Best of Tucson" mobile app.

Here are 5 deals that start on Saturday, Feb. 8:

- Buy a sandwich at 4th Avenue Delicatessen and get free chips and soda.

- $10 off when you spend $40 or more at Social House Kitchen & Pub.

- Buy three tacos and get a free quesadilla at BOCA Tacos.

- Tucson Museum of Art free entrance with purchase of a museum entrance. Disclaimer: Deal is invalid on Valentines Day, February 14th.

- Get a half off painting session with a purchase of a painting session at Creative Juice.

Leo Grand, lost his job and was forced out of his home, has been homeless on the streets of New York City since 2011. In August of this year a man named Patrick McConlogue, made Leo an offer. He would give the man $100 or teach him how to code. Leo chose the coding lessons. It’s a modern day application of the old proverb: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

After Leo and Patrick met regularly for 16 weeks of coding lessons, Leo began creating an app.

Some humans are capable of running at a greater speed than that. Three recorded human specimens have sustained a speed greater than 16 miles per hour over the distance of an entire mile. If the WildCat were for some reason asked to pursue these humans, it would need to run for a full four or five minutes before it could overtake them.

In the last five minutes, I've read Facebook posts where people admitted to stealing clothes, stringing along dates, terrible gas and fifteen-to-thirty minutes of porn fame. All of it was posted within an hour or so of having read it, and all of it comes from one source: the student body of the University of Arizona.

U of A Confessions is, apparently, where Wildcats are going to vent their spleens on just about everything: politics ("I just looked up what a government shut down is and now I feel like it would probably benefit this great country"), relationship dynamics ("My boyfriend peed on the toilet seat so I shaved my pubes with his razor. I think we're even now :)") odd hobbies ("I do really want to use [my vibrator] in class this week but honestly the hardest part about doing that will be trying to keep my mouth shut while it's running. I'm fairly loud as it is, add the excitement of knowing I'm doing it with so many people around, I'm not sure I'll be able to stay quiet") and everything in between.

• Kobby Dagan / Shutterstock.com

Facebook, the social networking site seemingly everyone uses, but no one seems to enjoy, is considering adding TV-style fifteen second commercials to users' news feeds, according to Bloomberg, priced at $1-2.5 million a day.

People at Facebook, including Mark Zuckerberg, are apparently paying at least lip service to how their customer base will react to these ads:

Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, who has been working with global marketing head Carolyn Everson on the video ad service, pushed back the start date at least twice, wanting to make sure Facebook’s user experience won’t be tainted by the ads, according to the people. Zuckerberg wants high-definition video and easy-to-use playback features, the people said.

Zuckerberg said last week that he’s sensitive to how users react to advertising in general. He plans to limit the amount of ads people see to about one for every 20 updates. That would comprise about 5 percent of a user’s news feed.

“One of the things I watch most closely is the quality of our ads and people’s sentiment around them,” Zuckerberg said. “We haven’t measured a meaningful drop in satisfaction.”

However, the Bloomberg report mentions that the ads will only make up five percent of a user's feed and that a user won't see a commercial more than three times a day, but the real question is whether these ads will auto-play, similar to those on YouTube. It's hard to imagine a company coughing up seven digits to buy a video ad that requires a click to become active, basically because no one (well, very few people, at least) is ever going to willingly subject themselves to fifteen seconds of McDonald's championing the return of the Monopoly game. I deal with the ads on YouTube because I recognize they're the cost involved in being able to watch 90's music videos at my whim. It's a workable deal. I don't know if I'll feel the same way if a video starts playing, with audio, so I can see another shared post from George Takei.