Most people are happy to receive gifts just because of their social customs, but in fact they don't like them, As the New Year approaches, we may be eager to see the joy on the faces of those who receive gifts. How to prepare a thoughtful gift?Here are some recommended brands for you.

Patek Pillippe, a Swiss watch manufacturer (制造商) founded in 1839, located in Geneva and the Vallée de Joux. A Patek watch isn't a device for telling time. It can transfer values across generations. It is intended to express the attitude of modern men towards parenthood. The real spirit of this brand is closeness, emotion and togetherness. Those are what you want enjoy and pass on from generation to generation.

Cognac. Cognac is a type of brandy made from distilled white wine. In fact, the word “brandy” comes from a Dutch word which means burnt wine. The origin of Cognac dates back to the 16th century when Dutch sellers came to a French region to buy salt, wood, and wine. And soon this brandy is named after its birthplace, a little town in southwest of France. Cognac is the most complex wine to make and it takes the longest time to produce—centuries, in some cases.

Frifuli is both the group name and the brand name. Founded in 1982 in Athens, Greece. Frifuli designs and manufactures jewelry. Today it has more than 390 stores in 25 countries around the world. At the beginning, Frifuli was to design and manufacture jewelry. With the addition of the watch series in 1994 and the accessories (饰品) series in 1998, Frifuli has gradually become a fashion brand covering the three fields of jewelry, watches and accessories.

Six weeks before his birthday, Giuseppe Paternò achieved the dream of a lifetime: He got a university degree.

Mr. Paternò's graduation has inspired news coverage around the world, partly because of his age. But he has mainly drawn attention because his life story speaks of commitment, a theme that has encouraged as millions of schoolchildren in Italy and elsewhere faces extraordinary uncertainty during the coronavirus pandemic.

Born in Palermo in 1923, the first of seven children in a “very poor family,” Mr. Paternò began working soon after finishing elementary school. “The family was large, there was only one paycheck, we were under fascism, and times were tough,” he said.

Eventually, he ended up at a publishing house where an enlightened boss persuaded his father to send him back to school for a three-year vocational degree. Mr. Paternò then worked for an insurance agency while he took private classes to become a telegraph operator. He used skills from the operator job when he was drafted into the navy in World War II. The job also opened doors to the State Railways Company, where he worked for more than four decades.

It was only after he retired, in the mid-1980s, that he returned to his books, taking theology courses through the Archdiocese of Palermo after a chance meeting with a philosophy professor who urged him to follow his love.

Mr. Paterno's son, Ninni Paternò, said that the family had not expected all the attention. “It's unbelievable!” the vounger Paternò said of his father. “He achieved his goal, but he didn't mean to be famous in newspapers around the world.”

University officials are hoping that Mr. Paternò will continue his studies on waster's course. But he isn't so sure. “I have to admit that in this moment, I don't know whether I would do it with the same spirit,” he said on Wednesday. Still, Mr. Paternò said he would probably continue anyway.

We recognize our friends’ faces. And we’re not alone. Many social animals can identify individuals of their own species by features of their faces. That's important, because they need to be able to change their behavior depending on who they meet. And a recent research has shown that some species of monkeys, birds, and domesticated (家养的) animals can even tell different faces apart by looking at photographs alone.

Ethologist Léa Lansade of the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment did an experiment to find out how well horses can recognize individual people in photographs.

She and her team first taught the horses how to “choose” between two side-by-side pictures by touching their noses to a computer screen. The horses were then shown photos of their present keeper alongside faces of unfamiliar humans. They had never seen photos of any of the people before. The horses correctly identified their current keeper and ignored (忽视) the stranger’s face about 75%of the time. In fact, even though the horses didn't get it right every single time, they were at least as correct in picking out their earlier keeper as they were at identifying their present one.

The results suggest that not only can horses differentiate between familiar and unfamiliar human faces, they also naturally understand that photographs are two dimensional representations (二维呈现) of real life, without any other intimations such as smell or sound. And they’re even better at this than our oldest animal parter, the domestic dog.

In addition, horses seem to have a strong long-term memory for human faces, like their long lifespan and history of domestication. In future experiments, the researchers would like to test whether looking at photos of people that they have had bad experiences with in the past might cause horses to act anxious or even avoidance. So maybe think twice before doing anything that might give a horse a long face.

Throwing away unwanted food has become a big issue in the developed world. While some of us do this, people in other parts of world are short of food. It's a shocking fact that a third of the world's food is wasted each year and that the actual figure is 1.3 billion tons of food, which is enough to feed a billion hungry people.

You may think supermarkets are the main contributors to this mountain of food. After all, they do threw away food that's past its sell-by-date and they often refuse to sell vegetables or fruit that are the wrong shape or look damaged. They've also been criticized (批评) for encouraging customers to buy more than they need through promotions (促销) such as “buy one get one free”.

But the biggest responsible person for creating food waste is us. In Europe an incredible 53%of food waste comes from familes, which results in 88 million tons of food waste a year. So instead of filling our stomachs, our food is filling up landfill sites. Unfortunately this causes greenhouse gases which finally leads to global warming and climate change.

In Denmark, a woman called Selina Juul has been working hard to stop this problem. She moved from Russia many years ago and was amazed to see so much food in the supermarkets. But to her surprise，she found that people were buying more than they needed and throwing too much away.

She persuaded some supermarkets to stop selling their items in large amount so that people bought only what they needed. She produced a leftovers (剩菜) cookbook and she's now set up an education programme in schools. This has helped reduce by 25%in food waste, which shows that something can be done.

Clearly, we need to think twice when we put something in our shopping cart, and when we're at home we should make the most of the food we have—using recipes that use up our leftovers or even sharing them with our friends and neighbours.