ACTIVITY SCHEDULE FOR THE COMING WEEK

What is a family? Why does it matter? What does it teach us that we can’t learn on our own? These questions seem especially relevant in the holiday season when it is often our tradition to gather as families and celebrate together.

My mother was one of twelve children. As they grew up, married and had children of their own, most of them lived near enough to gather for holidays at my grandparents’ home in a small town in the mountains of North Carolina.

I don’t recall getting many gifts from them .I remember the sense of belonging, of being part of something that assured me I was loved and not alone.

I delighted in the laughing, playing and fighting with my crazy cousins. I watched my granddad and uncles sit on the porch, rain or shine, smoking and joking, arguing about politics and trying to solve the problems of the world. I listened to my grandmother, mother and aunts stir (搅拌) pots on the stove and talk about their lives, hopes, dreams and disappointments, and gossip about any sister who failed to show up.

The food was always plentiful and delicious-country ham, sweet potatoes, green beans, biscuits and my grandmother’s banana pudding. But for me, the food was never the highlight. The highlight was simply being together. A family.

However, they’re all gone now. My parents and grandparents, my aunts and uncles have left this world for the next. My cousins are scattered here and there. And yet the memories linger, along with the love that we shared.

I treasure those memories and the things they taught me. They told me that families aren’t perfect, but they prepare us to find our way in an imperfect world. They made me realize that all families are crazy in their own particular ways.

My husband and I are growing a new family, while keeping close to the surviving members of the families. It’s a beautiful blend (混合) of kindness, traditions, nurturing (养育) and friendships, which grows year after year.

I hope this holiday season will fill you with lovely memories of the family that raised you, and surround you with all the people who mean “family” to you now.

During the outbreak of novel coronavirus, cities are locked down and borders are closed. Science, on the contrary, is becoming more open. And this “open science” is already making a difference.

Soon after the epidemic (流行病) started in China, a research team from Fudan University in Shanghai successfully sequenced (测定序列) the DNA of the virus. But they didn’t keep the information to themselves. Instead, they placed the sequences on GenBank, an open-access data platform, so researchers around the world could download them for free and start studying the virus.

Due to this openness, companies producing drugs across the globe are now able to work at the same time to develop a vaccine (疫苗). “There may be room for multiple different vaccines for different purposes and different age groups,” Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security in the US, told Al Jazeera. “The bigger menu we have of vaccines, the more flexible we’ll be when fighting against coronavirus outbreaks in the future.”

Major drug companies around the world are also sharing their study results. Remdesivir, a drug originally developed by US company Gilead Sciences to treat Ebola, is found to be promising in fighting against the novel coronavirus. Currently, two trials of the drug are already underway in China, and the results might be available as soon as April, according to The Verge.

This openness in science is going to be even more important in the future. “With climate change, increasing globalization, and population shifts, epidemics will not go away, and might even become more frequent,” Dan Barouch, a Harvard Medical School professor, told Harvard Magazine.

He said, “No one group can do everything. It has to be a cooperative approach. But I do think that the world has a greater sense of readiness this time to develop knowledge, drugs, and treatment very rapidly.”

Every epidemic is indeed a crisis, but it can also be a learning opportunity. One redeeming (补偿的) factor of the COVID-19 outbreak is that it is helping science adapt for the better.

Calling someone a “birdbrain” is considered rude. It implies that someone has a small brain and thus is not smart. A new study found that the expression doesn’t do birds justice either. Birds’ brains are much bigger than we thought-at least compared to their small bodies.

An international team of 37 scientists measured the brain volume of hundreds of dinosaurs and extinct birds by scanning fossils of their skulls. The readings were compared to a large database containing the brain sizes of modern birds. These measurements were then analyzed, taking into consideration each bird’s body size-resulting in something called “relative brain size”. The results showed that a dramatic change of birds’ body size happened right after the mass extinction of dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

According to the study, published on April 23 in the journal Current Biology, birds and non-avian (非鸟类的) dinosaurs had similar brain sizes before the extinction. After the extinction of the dinosaurs, however, birds had to find a way to survive, so they shrank their bodies-since smaller animals need less food-but they kept their big brains.

“The changed landscape may have caused the rapid evolution of new brain-body scaling patterns (缩放比例) by favoring both larger brains and smaller bodies,” US paleontologist (古生物学家) Daniel Ksepka, who is the lead author of the study, told CNN.

This “evolutionary brain leap”-as scientists call it-also happened very rapidly. Without dinosaurs, birds quickly repopulated. They came in all types and sizes, which contributed to the diverse species of birds we see today.

But among all the bird species, certain ones “show above average rates of brain and body size evolution”, study co-author Adam Smith at Clemson University, US, said in a statement-with crows and parrots being the most evident. In fact, previous studies have already discovered that these birds have an amazing cognitive ability. They are able to use tools, imitate human speech and even remember human faces.

So, in the words of Smith, “calling someone ‘bird-brained’ is actually quite a compliment!”