I spent 2 winters in Antarctica with people with strong accents, e.g. Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish, Scouse, Geordie, Cumbrian, and Devonian. On my return to the UK a lot of people said I'd developed a Brummie accent, although none of my fellow winterers were from Birmingham. My theory was that I'd developed an accent averaged across all the strong ones! It's interesting to see a scientific study showing how accents changed over an Antarctic winter!
Jon Worth's [1] CrossBorderRail project [2] aims to highlight missing cross-border rail links in Europe. He's recently embarked on a huge rail and bike journey that crosses every internal border inside the European Union (and EFTA countries) that you can cross by train. En route he's stopping off to organise a meeting in the political capital of each country to discuss the missing rail links with local activists.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation's Code Club World [1] is designed for young people aged 9-13. It provides a fun and more gradual introduction to block-based programming leading on to projects using Scratch and Python.