You know that classics like Little Women and To Kill a Mockingbird started as novels. But you probably didn’t know that these other famous movies also came from books.

Hidden Figures

This film told the story of real-life Katherine Johnson and other female African-American mathematicians who helped drive the United States into space in the 1960s. It was actually based on a 2016 non-fiction book and the movie did boost sales of the book.

Forrest Gump

The 1994 movie which was based on the book by Winston Groom won six Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor for the star Tom Hanks. Although the movie’s critical and box-office success gave the book a huge boost, it’s the film that made its mark on pop culture history.

The Girl on the Train

Paula Hawkin’s psychological thriller, about a woman on a train who thinks she sees something strange out of the window, was a huge success. But unlike the fast—paced, can’t-be-put-down quality of the novel, the movie was boring.

Field of Dreams

It’s hard to describe the plot of this movie: Ray Kinsella hears a voice telling him to build a baseball field in his Iowa cornfield, and what happens next explores the themes of lost dreams, childhood heroes, and healing the pain of the past. The 1989 movie is based on W. P. Kinsella’s 1982 original, Shoeless Joe, but cuts out some extra characters.

Kwane Stewart stepped outside a convenience store and spotted a homeless man with a small dog sitting in the lap. Stewart, a vet at an animal shelter, noticed its scratched-off furs—signs of an allergic reaction to fleas(跳蚤). He approached the man and offered to bring flea medications for the dog’s skin, a gift the man readily accepted. “I remember returning a week later, and the hair was coming back, the red spots on its skin were gone,” Stewart told the Modesto Bee. The man said his dog was no longer staying up scratching and was sleeping well. “‘And you know,’ he said, ‘I’m sleeping at night.’ He started to cry, and that got me choked up too,” Stewart said. Stewart was hooked. “When you give back, there is something you get in return that feels much larger. I knew I wanted to keep doing it,” he told medium.com.

Today, Stewart, 50, has his own practice in town, yet he still finds time for street pets. He’s helped roughly 400 animals since 2011, mostly dogs but also a few cats.

There’s a strong need for his kind of help. About 25 percent of Modesto’s homeless population own a pet, but there are few health-care options available to them. To fill that void, Stewart, using his free time, wanders dark alleyways and underpasses, anywhere he thinks the homeless might be camped out. He carries his medical bag, which contains treatments—vaccines, antibiotics, flea medications, and more. Stewart pays for almost all of it out of his own pocket.

For those expensive procedures, he setup a Go Fund Me account to provide enough money for treatment. “I don’t ever want to have to turn anybody away,” he explains.

He knows there are some people who question whether the homeless should even have pets. How can they care for them on the street? Stewart told the Bee, “I think that more than anybody, they need a pet. They love their pets probably more than the average person.”

Did you know roughly one third of food for human consumption goes to waste? Most of it is fresh fruits and vegetables that go bad. The produce dries out or goes bad, which has led scientists to develop ways of coating or sealing the food to keep it fresher for longer. Now research at Rice University reveals there might be a better way.

Scientists discovered that dipping produce like strawberries and bananas into an egg-based was his remarkably good for preserving it. The coating is extremely thick, and made from a mixture of powdered egg whites and yolks(70%), and some wood-sourced cellulose(纤维素) to act as a barrier preventing water loss.

What the scientists found was that the egg-based wash made a significant difference in helping produce stay fresh over a two-week observation period. The appearance of the coated fruits and vegetables didn’t change much, while the uncoated produce ripened and even rotted within the same timeframe. The egg-based coating, as it turned out, reduced each fruit’s chance to get exposed to oxygen.

The non-poisonous coating was found to be flexible and tests showed that it was just as tough as other products， including synthetic films(合成膜), used in produce packaging. For anyone with an egg allergy, the coating can be removed by thorough washing in water and is tasteless.

The scientists hope this could be a breakthrough in the fight against food waste. “Reducing food shortages in ways that are not related to genetic modification, uneatable coatings or chemical additives is important for better sustainable living,” said materials scientist and study author Pulickel Ajayan.

What’s great about this discovery is that it fights food waste in more than one way: even the coating was made from eggs that would otherwise have been thrown away because they weren’t fit for consumption. The researchers said roughly 200 million of US produced eggs go to waste annually. So if this were scaled up, it could be a win-win situation all around.