Trinity College Dublin presented Caitriona Lally last week with the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, one of Ireland’s most prestigious literary honors. The prize committee praised her book, “Eggshells,” as “a work of impressive imaginative reach, witty, subtle and occasionally endearingly unpredictable.”

For the past 3½ years, Lally has worked as a janitor at the college.

The day the call came from the prize committee, Lally was so shocked and the experience felt so out of context, she asked the person who told her she had won the award to please explain it again.

Roberto Clemente's legacy as one of baseball's greatest players is matched only by the memory of the selfless sacrifice he made trying to help others in need.

The son of a sugar cane worker in Puerto Rico, Clemente showed athletic promise at an early age, joining the Puerto Rican amateur league in 1952 at the age of 16 and signing a minor league contract with a Brooklyn Dodgers affiliate two years later. In July 1954, Clemente's first home run in North America resulted in an extra-innings walk-off win for the triple-A Montreal Royals.

Hall of Fame numbers, for certain. But it's also for Clemente's humanitarian efforts that Google, in the spirit of Hispanic Heritage Month, dedicated its Doodle on Friday to the first Latin American player enshrined in Cooperstown. Clemente spent much of his off-season involved in charity work, delivering baseball equipment and food to those in need in Latin American and Caribbean countries. After a 6.3 earthquake killed thousands and caused widespread damage to Nicaragua on Dec. 23, 1972, Clemente began arranging emergency relief flights to deliver aid to survivors.

After learning that the aid packages were being diverted by corrupt government officials, Clemente decided to accompany a New Year's Eve flight to ensure the supplies were delivered to earthquake victims. But the plane, with a history of mechanical problems and overloaded by more than two tons, suffered an engine failure and crashed into the Atlantic Ocean immediately after takeoff. The body of the pilot was found a few days after the crash, but the bodies of Clemente and three others who were on the DC-7 were never recovered. He was 38.

At a time of growing global awareness about injustices against women, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded Friday to two people who have brought attention to the most extreme forms of violence they can face: a Congolese surgeon who treats victims of wartime rape and an activist who was a sexual slave of the Islamic State.

In recognizing Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad, the Norwegian Nobel Committee for the first time has devoted its award to the abuse of women in conflict zones — what some experts say has been an underappreciated aspect of war.

Mukwege has treated grievous injuries in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country that one U.N. official once called the rape capital of the world. Murad is among thousands of Iraqi Yazidis who have been treated as sexual property by the Islamic State, and since her escape she has become perhaps the most outspoken among them, campaigning to bring the militants to justice for war crimes.

Daniel McNeely is a pediatric neurosurgeon, so he’s used to fielding questions from nervous parents and patients.

But it was a first for him when an 8-year-old patient had a specific request as the child was being wheeled to surgery while clutching his stuffed animal: My bear is ripped. Please stitch him up.

McNeely, who works at IWK Health Centre in Halifax, Nova Scotia, assured the boy he would, and he took the task seriously. After McNeely performed surgery on the boy’s brain, he placed the bear on a table, put on blue gloves and used leftover stitches from the child’s surgery to repair an underarm tear on the bear, which is named Little Baby.

Megs Yunn was helping an 11-year-old named Beverly with her reading homework at an after-school club in Pittsburgh when the girl said something so shocking that it brought tears to Yunn’s eyes.

Yunn, who was director of volunteer programs at a local college at the time, was trying to explain to Beverly the meaning of the word “accustomed.” Yunn used it in a sentence, asking Beverly: “At birthday parties, people are accustomed to eating what?”

The girl, whose family struggled financially, was silent for a moment. “Miss Megs,” she said in a soft voice, “I’ve never had a birthday party or eaten a slice of birthday cake.”

Yunn later told The Washington Post that it had never occurred to her before that some kids do not have birthday parties. “I was stunned — it knocked the wind out of me,” said the 33-year-old mother of four. Yunn sobbed in her car on the drive home thinking about the parties she had thrown for her children and her own birthday parties as a child. Then Yunn decided she needed to do something for Beverly and other children living in poverty or in shelters who have never felt the excitement and joy of a birthday party.

On October 4, 1958, a group of MIT students created a new unit of linear measurement: The Smoot. Named after Oliver Smoot, the measurement unit gained notoriety when the students measured the length of the Harvard Bridge based on Smoot's height. But, the length of the Smoot has since changed, requiring a recalibration in 2016.

The Harvard Bridge crosses the Charles River, which separates Boston from Cambridge along Massachusetts Avenue—"Mass Ave" to the locals. MIT sits just on the Cambridge side. (We hear there's a liberal arts university also along Mass. Ave. in Cambridge, but MIT people reportedly don’t acknowledge its existence.) As a fraternity hack, the Lambda Chi Alpha pledge class of 1958 were told to measure the length of the bridge using Smoot's body. They did. At the time, the bridge measured 364.4 Smoots ±one ear.