【推荐2】At the beginning of my 8:00 a.m. class one Monday at UNLV(拉斯维加斯内华达大学), I cheerfully asked my students how their weekend had been. One young man said that his weekend had not been very good. The young man then proceeded to ask me why I always seemed to be so cheerful.

His question reminded me of something I’d read somewhere before: “Every morning when you get up, you have a choice about how you want to approach life that day,” I said to the young man. “I choose to be cheerful.”

“Let me give you an example,” I continued. “In addition to teaching here at UNLV, I also teach out at the community college in Henderson. One day a few weeks ago I drove to Henderson. I exited the freeway and turned onto College Drive. But just then my car died. I tried to start it again, but the engine wouldn’t turn over. So I put my flashers on, grabbed my books, and marched down the road to the college.”

As soon as I got there, the secretary in the Provost’s office asked me what had happened. “This is my lucky day”, I replied, smiling.

“Your car breaks down and today is your lucky day?” She was puzzled, “What do you mean?”

“I live seventeen miles from here. I replied. My car could have broken down anywhere along the freeway. It didn’t. Instead, it broke down in the perfect place: off the freeway, within walking distance of here. I’m still able to teach my class, and I’ve been able to arrange for the tow truck to meet me after class. If my car was meant to break down today, it couldn’t have been arranged in a more convenient fashion.”

【推荐3】Donna Strickland is a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. Professor Strickland is one of the recipients(受领者) of the Nobel Prize in Physics 2018 with Gérard Mourou, her PhD supervisor at the time. They published this Nobel-winning research in 1985 when Strickland was a PhD student at the University of Rochester in New York state. Together they paved the way toward the most intense laser pulses ever created.

Professor Donna Strickland is only the third woman ever to have won a Nobel Prize in physics. She and her fellow winners were honored for what the Nobel Committee called ground-breaking inventions in laser physics. Professor Strickland devised a way to use lasers as very precise drilling or cutting tools. Millions of eye operations are performed every year with these sharpest of laser beams.

—“How surprising do you think it is that you’re the third woman to win this prize? ”

—“Well, that is surprising, isn’t it? I think that’s the story of Maria that people want to talk about — that why should it take 60 years? There are so many women out there doing fantastic research, so why does it take so long to get recognized? ”

Physics still has one of the largest gender gaps in science. One recent study concluded that at the current rates it would be more than two centuries until there were equal numbers of senior male and female researchers in the field.

The last woman to win a physics Nobel was German-born Maria Goeppert-Mayer for her discoveries about the nuclei of atoms. Before that it was Marie Curie, who shared the 1903 prize with her husband, Pierre. This year’s winners hope that breaking this half century hiatus will mean the focus in future will be on the research, rather than the gender of the researcher.

【推荐1】Marty Verel, a 59-year-old kidney transplant patient in Ohio, should have been near the top of the list to receive a COVID-19 vaccine. Yet like millions of others, he wasn’t having any luck. Marty and his wife, Nancy Verel, would sit with computers on their laps trying for hours to book an appointment on different sites, all of which were complex. “I felt hopeless,” Nancy says.

Then Nancy heard about Marla Zwinggi, a 40-year-old mom of three who was spending up to ten hours a day online trying to secure appointments for vulnerable (易受攻击的) individuals. So Nancy messaged Marla on Facebook: Can you help? Twenty-five minutes later, Marla responded by asking for Marty’s legal name, date of birth, and other information. Nine minutes after that, Marla reported back — Marty had an appointment.

Maria’s vaccine hunting started on February 1, when she learned that her parents — her father has leukemia (白血病) and her mother is a breast cancer survivor with a heart condition — were unable to get appointments themselves. She hated that they had to wait. Clicking around on vaccine registration sites, Marla discovered just how difficult it was to                           book an appointment “was like trying to get a World Series ticket,” she says.

She applied strategies that web insiders are familiar with(keeping multiple browsers open, refreshing sites every 20 seconds, erasing cookies) and added a few of her special skills. “I’m determined. I drink a lot of coffee, and I’m a fast typer,” she says. Soon enough, Marla had secured appointments for her parents. “I felt like a rock star,” she says.

Marla decided that helping others would be her way of giving back. “I feel like I need to will us out of this pandemic (大流行病)”, she says. On February 10, she logged on to Facebook to let people know that she was assisting with bookings. By March 2, she’d secured appointments for 400 seniors, a feat that made Nancy conclude, “Marla is some sort of COVID angel.”

【推荐2】In the live-streaming (直播) channel of Yang Weiyun, no singing or dancing is performed nor are products sold. Yang teaches pinyin, reading and writing, something that has been most familiar to her for the past 50 years. The difference is her students are mostly adults.

The 73-year-old comes from Huainan city of Anhui province and is an experienced educator. She had been a Chinese teacher in an elementary school for 50 years. In retirement, Yang also wanted to do something meaningful. The rise of short video platforms gave her the idea of continuing her education attempt through live-streaming online. The retiree opened her live-streaming account in May 2021 and offered free pinyin courses designed for kindergarten pupils about to attend primary schools. However, she gradually learned among her viewers there are a lot of illiterate (文盲) adults.

Yang said she found many illiterate adults develop a sense of lack of confidence. They are afraid to go to new places, worried that they couldn’t teach their children or read their boss’s instructions. So, she added targeted content (内容) to meet their needs. “Many illiterate adults didn’t have the chance to go to school when they were young. They are the ones in urgent need of becoming literate. I wanted to give them a new starting point,” Yang said.

According to the seventh national census (人口普查) carried out last year, there are 38 million illiterate adults in China. Yang’s live-streaming channel offers an easy and private way for those who want to overcome adult illiteracy.

Yang said students learning through her live-streaming channel each have their own demands. So she always prepares her classes carefully after concluding a live-streaming session. She has tried her best to figure out what ways the students can learn and remember better, and her biggest wish now is to see these students graduate from her classes.

【推荐3】Amy Jandrisevits knows the value of a good doll. “Dolls have a power we don’t completely understand,” she says. It’s a conclusion she came to while working as a pediatric oncology (儿科肿瘤) social worker using dolls to help her young patients adapt to their changing medical situations. Many of the kids saw themselves in those good dolls, but for the kids who had lost their legs or hair, there were none they could relate to.

So, eight years ago, when a friend said that her child was disabled, Jandrisevits knew what might help the youth through the challenging period. “It’s hard to tell a kid, ‘You are perfect the way you are’, and it is important to build the kids’ self-confidence,” she says.

Jandrisevits went about changing that. She made a doll by hand, which looked like her friend’s child and sent it off. After the friend posted a photo of the happy child and doll on-line, another woman asked Jandrisevits to make a doll that looked like her baby, who had lost a leg.

Word spread, and soon Jandrisevits made dolls for children with different physical defects (缺陷) — in short, dolls that looked like them. She quit her job and started a nonprofit, A Doll Like Me. Working out of her home in Milwaukee, based on photos sent by kids’ parents or caregivers, Jandrisevits takes about seven hours to make each doll. A GoFundMe page helps her make up for costs and allows her to donate her services. She hasn’t charged for a doll since she began her nonprofit.

In all, she has made more than 400 dolls. The waiting list is long, but Jandrisevits is undefeated. As she explains on her GoFundMe page, “Every kid, regardless of age or body type, should look into the sweet face of a doll and see their own.”