Absolutely Unputdownable Books You Have to Read
Flowers for Algernon
Daniel Keyes
If you're seeking a pleasant read, try this short story by Daniel Keyes. He'll show you how a person feels going from a simple cleaner at a bakery, whose IQ is less than 60, to a genius and the most intelligent person on the planet. In a situation like this, is it possible to overcome your fears and cope with loneliness? Keyes offers his answer to this question.
Orphans of the Sky
Robert A. Heinlein
A giant generation ship is sailing without guidance through the depths of the universe. Its passengers have long forgotten the outside world and believed in a pre-technological culture marked by superstition （迷信）. This novel has brought Heinlein wide recognition, and will grasp you tight and won't let you go for months （or even years） afterward. Are we, the digital generation, different from the passengers of that imaginary spaceship?
95 Pounds of Hope
Anna Gavalda
Adapted from the author's own experience, this story is about the main things in life: choices we make, the power of love and devotion. The story of a thirteen-year-old boy who one day has to gather all his strength and courage and take a step towards adulthood proves once again that dreams do come true. After all, no matter how many pounds we have, we're all trying not to lose hope.
A Certain Smile
Francoise Sagan
If you don't enjoy thrillers or sci-fi and stories about dragon-riding detectives, if you're longing for something emotional, slow and gentle, this beautiful little book by Francoise Sagan is just what you need. Strongly recommended by psychological doctors, it's a pleasant exception among traditional romance novels: you'll find all of the advantages of high-quality literature here. And yes, it's a real page-turner.
The most eye-catching performance from the final weekend of the U. S. Olympic Track and Field Trials didn't break a world record or send a teenager to Tokyo. But Lindsay Flach still became the shining star. Lindsay Flach competed in the heptathlon（七项全能） 18 weeks pregnant and showed off a growing belly. Though she finished a distant last among the 15 women who made it through all seven events of the heptathlon, her participation this past weekend was a victory in itself.
The 2020 season was supposed to be Flach's last chance to compete in the heptathlon, the sport that developed into her enthusiasm over the past decade. She intended to grasp a chance on the U. S. Olympic team one final time before marrying her longtime boyfriend and starting a family together.
In early 2020, Flach quit her job, temporarily left her soon-to-be-husband behind and moved nearly 250 miles south to train with her new coach at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. She intended to remain there through the 2020 U. S. Olympic Trials. Then the pandemic（疫情） struck three months into her training.
When the spread of COVID-19 forced the postponement（延迟） of the Tokyo Games and cast doubt on whether they would ever happen, Flach, 31, decided she could no longer put her life on hold. In March, Flach began struggling to hit marks that had previously been routine to her. She took a pregnancy test that came back positive, a result that made her doubt whether her Olympic hopeful.
The pregnancy weakened Flach's strength and energy but not her desire to say goodbye to track and field on her own terms. While Flach's final score was less than half her personal best, she's trying not to focus on that aspect, nor on the fact that she never qualified for an Olympics in her career. She's excited for what's to come in her life, excited she was able to participate in a third Olympic Trials and excited that she showed how strong would-be mothers can be.
Are you patient? Do you have attention to detail, free time and access to a computer? Well, then a scientist might welcome your help. Researchers in the UK say it's becoming important to count on common people to help them with their projects. They need people to examine data and submit their observations online.
British teenagers Sasha and Matthew are taking part in a study of penguins（企鹅） from the comfort of their homes. The pair look at pictures and tag（标签） photos identifying adults, chicks and eggs. Every click of their mouse is helping to build up a detailed picture of penguin colonies（群）. They, and thousands of others, are helping scientists to understand why some colonies are growing and others are decreasing. Within the first four hours of Penguin Watch going live, "citizen scientists" marked more images than the research team had in five years.
Dr. Tom Hart, Penguin Watch Coordinator at Oxford University, says, "When you go beyond what a scientist can analyse to what a mass audience can do, then it increases beyond what any other project could do."
The British Science Association says families are helping out with careful research. It made a difference to the Planet Hunters Project, which ran for five years. Volunteers looked at dots which showed how the brightness of a star changed at different points in its solar system.
According to Dr. Robert Simpson from Oxford University, who took part in the project, the volunteers discovered planets and these are now in published papers. He says with pride, "We can go and look at these planets with other telescopes and we know they exist because of those helpers."
But how do scientists guard their research against accidental or deliberate mistakes in observation? Dr. Simpson isn't worried. "We get lots of people looking at the same things," he says. The researcher warns that people who are mistakenly clicking on the site are very obvious and can be identified very quickly. So, there's no fooling the scientists.
And to make sure things go well, the Penguin Watch paper will go through a peer review before being published. After that, every "citizen scientist" will be credited.
Social distancing is not a new concept in the natural world, where infectious diseases are commonplace. Through specialized senses animals can detect certain diseases and change their behavior to avoid getting ill.
In 1966, while studying chimps（猩猩） in a Tanzanian national park, zoologist Jane Goodall observed a chimp named McGregor who had caught a highly infectious virus. His fellow chimps attacked him and threw him out of the group. In one instance, McGregor approached chimps in a tree. He reached out a hand in greeting, but the others moved away without a backward glance.
"For a full two minutes, old McGregor sat motionless, staring after them," Goodall notes in her 1971 book In the Shadow of Man. "It's really not that different to how some societies react today to such a tragedy. "
Not all animals are so aggressive toward their sick neighbors. Sometimes it's as simple as avoiding those who may infect you.
When Kiesecker, a lead scientist in America, studied American bullfrog in the late 1990s, he found that bullfrogs could not only detect a deadly smell of infection in other bullfrogs, but healthy members actively avoided those that were sick. Bullfrogs rely on chemicals signals to determine who is sick or not.
Caribbean lobsters（龙虾） also avoid diseased members of their community, well before they become infectious. It takes about eight weeks for lobsters infected with the deadly virus to become dangerous to others. Normally social animals, lobsters begin keeping away from the diseased as early as four weeks after infection—once the lobsters can smell certain chemicals released by sick individuals.
"Overall, it's important to note that, unlike us, animals don't realize if they stay home, they might actually reduce the infection rate," Kiesecker explains. "As humans, we have that ability. It's a big difference. "
The comfort zone is a safe space where we don't risk, but neither do we grow. Change and growth occur. We can not become what we want to be, remaining in what we are today. There are many good reasons to be encouraged to leave the comfort zone.
Prepare yourself for difficult times. Safe as we feel in our comfort zone, that space will not protect us from the problems, which usually appear in life in an unexpected way producing great changes. These problems can produce psychological disorders. But learning to live outside the comfort zone, dealing with novelty and uncertainty will make us people emotionally stronger.
The comfort zone represents everything we know. Outside is another world to discover. In the comfort zone there are no great ideas or new discoveries. It's necessary to leave the known to find the inspiration to creativity. In fact, a study conducted at the University of Florida found that students who spent just one term outside their country scored better on creativity tests than those who had been studying at the same university.
Feel more alive. Leaving the comfort zone, we meet new people and live new experiences. Some of these experiences will not be positive but others will become a driving force that gives us new energy. Thus we're learning to enjoy more life.
Exercises to get out of your comfort zone will allow you to expand your growth zone without experiencing too much anxiety. That's in the growth zone, and you can reach the best of ourselves, learn new things.
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A. Become more productive. B. Increase your creativity. C. Generally, we are not used to them. D. Yet magical things happen outside the comfort zone. E. It might become the perfect excuse not to do, not risk. F. Face new challenges with an acceptable level of anxiety. G. The feeling of being empty will be discovered to disappear. |
After watching my son Todd run in a race, I made my usual comment, "Todd, I could walk faster than those women run." Todd1as he knew I wasn't a runner." Listen, Mom, how about you run with me next year at this race?" Without thinking, I quickly agreed to this2. I felt this was going to be a piece of cake!
Never in my3dreams did I ever imagine what the next year would bring. When it was almost time for this race to4, Todd wasn't going to be running. He had died in a car accident. A few of his friends knew this "challenge" I had agreed to with Todd. They started to5me to run the race. I hadn't6or prepared anything. Quite7, I had almost forgotten I said I would do it.
I decided I should keep my8. Before the race, I listened to some9talking about how to run your race. I played the race over and over in my10when I listened to the tapes. The day of the race finally came. I felt pretty11. When it was time for the race, I was all dressed and ready. It was freezing cold that day, but I didn't care. I12all my warm clothes and ran with only a sleeveless shirt and shorts on. Nothing was going to13me.
No one knew what14me to run. I finished my practice run, fell on the grass, and cried my eyes out. I found that running15the stress I was feeling of losing my dear Todd.
Scientists at the University of Liverpool （UL）have developed a robot that can run experiments on its own. It's not new for labs to use robots. But earlier robots usually stayed in one place and （ do）one job over and over again. The UL robot is different. It's able to （easy）move around in the same kind of space as humans do. It uses a special system called LiDAR to guide （it）. With one long arm which can turn in almost any direction, the robot can use several different kinds of lab equipment and carry out variety of tasks.
The scientists says it took a lot of work （program）the robot so that it could do things without （make）mistakes. Once the programming is done, though, the robot makes （ few）mistakes than a human.
To test their robot, the scientists gave it a task: find a material was able to produce hydrogen（氢）from water. The robot was programmed to understand the basic methods for the experiment, but it （give）10 different things it could change which could influence the results, That meant that the robot could choose from around 98 million different mini-experiments. Over the next 8 days, the robot ran 688 experiments, always choosing its next experiment based the results of the last one.
Travelling can teach you a lot. Sometimes, on your journey, despite coming from totally different backgrounds, we were able to connect on a human level and learn from each other. I have learned about kindness when travelling in too many ways, but there is one particular example that stands out in my memory.
Eight years ago, a friend and I journeyed to Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic to rent a private villa on the beach and do some relaxing. In the morning, we went to see the new sun sparkled gold across the ripples of gentle sea. In the evening, we stepped barefoot on the soft sandy beach, feeling the waves touching our feet and watching the setting sun leaving the sky afire with orange and green light. It was so much fun living on the beach.
Apart from the breathtaking scenery on the beach, I was also constantly touched by the warm hospitality of the Dominican people in general, but Pedro totally blew me away. He worked at our villa as the security guard. He also regularly provided assistance to all guests by accompanying them on their excursions to ensure they would be safe among local scenes where tourists may not be common or could be taken advantage of. However, he did not speak good English so often it was a bit challenging for him. Luckily, I speak Spanish so I was able to communicate very well with Pedro and this delighted him. Due to this, we chatted a lot and felt very connected. Pedro insisted on catering to our every need. He would not even let us lift a finger in the villa, which was above and beyond his duties. He told us we reminded him of his daughter and he felt like our "Papa" so he had to take care of us.
What really blew me away though is that Pedro basically ended up saving my life.
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After I arrived, I suddenly found myself catching a heavy cold and felt terrible.
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The day before our departure, I was finally feeling a lot better due to the medical care I was given.
