Kathy Fletcher and David Simpson have a son named Santi. He had a friend who sometimes went to school hungry. So Santi invited him to occasionally eat and sleep at his house.
That friend had a friend and that friend had a friend, and now when you go to dinner at Kathy and David's house on Thursday night there might be 15 to 20 teenagers gathering around the table, and later there will be groups of them crashing in the basement or in the few small bedrooms upstairs. The kids who show up at Kathy and David's have suffered the pains of modern poverty: homelessness, hunger, abuse.
And yet by some miracle, hostile soil has produced beautiful flowers. Kids come from around the city. Spicy chicken and black rice are served. Cellphones are banned. The kids who call Kathy and David “Momma” and “Dad,” are polite and clear the dishes. Birthdays and graduations are celebrated. Songs are performed. Each meal we go around the table and everybody has to say something nobody else knows about them. Each meal the kids show their promise to care for one another.
The adults in this community give the kids the chance to present their gifts. “At my first dinner, Edd read a poem that I first thought was from Langston Hughes, but it turned out to be his own. Kesari has a voice that somehow appeared from New Orleans jazz from the 1920s. Madeline and Thalya practice friendship as if it were the highest art form.”
“They give us a gift — complete intolerance of social distance. When I first met Edd, I held out my hand to shake his. He looked at it and said, “We hug here,” and we've been hugging since.”
Bill Milliken, a veteran youth activist, is often asked which programs turn around kids' lives. “I still haven't seen one program change one kid's life,” he says. “What changes people is relationships. Somebody is willing to walk through the shadow of the valley of adolescence with them.” Souls are not saved in bundles. Love is the necessary force.
Ever wondered why your partner is up with the lark (百灵鸟) while you are happily sleeping till noon? It could be thanks to Neanderthal genes, according to a new study.
Scientists comparing ancient DNA with the genetics of modern humans discovered a "striking trend", said John Capra, an epidemiologist (流行病学家) at the University of California in San Francisco. The researchers found that the Neanderthal genes that remain affect the body clock —increasing tendency to be a morning person.
Neanderthals lived at higher latitudes (纬度) than our ancestors who migrated from Africa — further away from the equator, with the days longer in summer and shorter in winter. "The gene that makes people early risers likely enables more rapid alignment (协调一致) of the circadian clock (生物钟) with changing seasonal light patterns," Dr Capra said, "when Neanderthals were able to make the most of daylight hours to hunt."
Scientists have previously explored how the circadian rhythms of insects, plants, and fish have developed depending on latitude. But that hasn't been well studied in humans. There searchers wanted to see whether there was a genetic reason for differences in circadian rhythms between Neanderthals and modern people, and found 16 variants (变异体) associated with greater "morningness". They suspected that as Neanderthals and the ancestors of modern humans mated, people today could have followed Neanderthal "circadian variants".
To test this, scientists analyse the genetics of several hundred thousand people from the UK Biobank and found many of the variants that affect sleep preference. "Most noticeably, they found that these variants increase morningness," the researchers said. This is consistent with what has been found in other animals that have adapted to living at a high latitude, as Neanderthals did.
When people think of farming today, they usually picture a tractor(拖拉机) rather than horses in the farmland. That's because tractors that relied on engines revolutionized farming in the late 1800 s. Now a new type of tractor can do the same in the 21st century.
Agriculture has been changing dramatically in the last few. decades. The push for innovation is fed by the need to produce larger amounts of food for a growing world population. Autonomous tractors may be the key to solving this challenge. They can be used to carry out labor-intensive (劳动密集型) farming while allowing farmers to do other work. A big plus is that it can increase crop output while reducing costs because the autonomous machines can work in all weather conditions without any rest.
Part of push for automation is a shortage of farm workers due to people's desire to have higher paying jobs with better work conditions. Farm owners are competing against companies like Amazon and restaurants that are raising wages to attract workers. "With labor shortages and the increase in the hourly wages that have to be paid in order to be competitive, all of a sudden automation seems like a more reasonable decision," said David Swartz, a professor at Penn State University.
Many believe the time is ripe for an autonomous revolution because robotics is already in use in agriculture. One. Company that is working to bring autonomous tractors. Into mainstream farming is Blue and White Robotics, an Israeli agricultural technology company, whose mission is to make a fully autonomous farm. The company released an autonomous tractor kit in February 2021 that can be fixed on any existing tractor. The kit includes camera detection, speed controls, as well as an anti-crash system. Blue and White's kit is being used by West Coast growers in the US. It may soon come to a farm near you.
Critics of higher education often complain that universities offer too many worthless degrees with little value in the workplace. Since top universities tend to produce higher-earning graduates than less selective institutions do, you might expect them to teach more practical courses. Yet data from Britain's department for education show the opposite. Undergraduate students at leading universities are more likely to study purely academic fields such as philosophy and classics, whereas those at less choosy ones tend to pick career-related topics such as business or nursing.
What could explain this seeming contradiction? One reason is that employers treat a degree from a top university as an indicator of intelligence. This means that students at top institutions can study bookish subjects and still get by financially. The average Cambridge graduate in a creative-arts subject - tho university's least profitable group of courses, including fields such as music - earns around £25, 000 ($32, 400) at age 26. Economics students from less well-known universities, such as Hull, make a similar amount.
Yet even though Oxbridge students can pretend to read "Ulysses" for years and still expect a decent salary, they end up paying a large opportunity cost by pursuing the arts. That is because employers reserve the highest starting wages for students who both attended a leading university and also studied a marketable subject. Cambridge creative-arts graduates earn £11, 000 more at age 26 than do those from Wrexham Glyndwr University, whose arts graduates are the lowest-earning in Britain. In contrast, Cambridge economics graduates make £44, 000 more than those from the University of Salford, where the economics course is the country's least profitable.
Many gifted arts students would struggle to deal with numbers. But for those who can manage both, the cost of sticking with the arts, in terms of future wages, is steep. Cambridge creative-arts students have A-level scores close to those of economics students at Warwick, but earn about half as much. That is equal to giving up an annual income worth £50, 000.
