【推荐2】When a British couple recently sold their beloved house, they believed they had tied everything up, and had been busy working to make sure the new owners could live in a house which was in a good condition before the sale. Repairs had been made and the paperwork had all been in order before they removed their belongings from the home where they had lived in the last 32 years or so.

A few weeks after they finished the sale, James and Clarrisa Munford discovered a box of treasures, which the former owners had hidden and forgotten all about — 30 gold and silver coins. Legally, the coins — which were valued as much as ten thousand pounds — were now the Munfords’ property, and they were well within their rights to quietly sell them and pocket the profits.

However, the Munfords, who own a business in London, immediately chose to get in touch with the sellers and return the coins, which had been left inside a built-in drawer in the home. “There is an old saying: ‘You harvest what you plant.’” said the original owner later, who didn’t believe his ears when receiving Mr. Munford’s call. “My wife and I spent a great deal of time and effort to ensure that we left our home in excellent conditions for the Munfords, and our kindness was certainly returned by another!” They wanted to give the Mun-fords some coins but they refused politely.

The sellers of the house were unwilling to be named, but said they wanted to share this story online to bring hope and inspiration to other people during these difficult times. “Now it is a good time to pause and reflect about how we treat each other. If there were more people like the Munfords, this world would be a much better place to live in,” he said.

【推荐3】Three years into my postdoc (博士后), I started to wonder whether I needed a new career plan. After applying for more than two dozen teaching jobs, I hadn’t landed a single interview.

I had once considered going to art school but had put that idea to the side when I decided to pursue chemistry as an undergraduate. In the years that followed, I kept up my interest in art by taking painting classes at night. My family was bursting with mathematicians, computer programmers, and engineers, so it felt natural to have my daily life center around science.

But in the spring after my failed job search, that started to change after a friend excitedly showed me proofs of a review article. She was astonished by what the journal’s scientific illustrator had done with her fundamental sketches (速写). “That would be such a fun job.” I thought.

I decided to test out a new career direction by volunteering to create similar illustrations for my institute’s newsletters. I spent my nights and weekends reading scientific papers and thinking about how to illustrate the results. It was a fun task. I felt I was perhaps on the right path. But could I make a full-time career work?

Searching online, I tracked down people who had that kind of job. I found many had training through scientific illustration master’s degree programs. After living on graduate student and postdoctoral salaries for years, I didn’t have enough money saved up for the programs, so I decided to get a certificate in digital design.

I now work as a visual designer at a biomedical research institute where I spend my days working with research to communicate their work visually. I love the fact that I get to combine my scientific and artistic sides.

【推荐2】For months now, our routines have been interrupted and we’ve been forced to adapt. Reportedly, one major consequence is a state of mental tiredness. It feels as if we’re all in a state of constant distraction.

“It felt like I had a mental block preventing me from focusing on the page,” says Sophie Vershbow, who recognized the mood early in the pandemic (流行病) when her tweet about “not being able to concentrate enough to read a book” was liked more than 2,000 times.

For many people, especially working parents, the sudden switch to home working has meant a conflict between work and life. It’s tricky to focus on a document as your kids wrestle for the TV remote control. But even when work is finished for the day and the kids are in bed, it’s hard to find any focus to escape into a novel or box-set.

A psychological theory called Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) might help explain why living in the age of COVID-19 may have turned our minds to soup. Put simply, CLT characterizes our minds as information processing systems. When we’re working on a problem, especially an unfamiliar one, we depend on our “working memory”, which is very limited both in its capacity and the length of time it holds information. The less familiar you are with a task, the more you depend on your working memory to help deal with the relevant information; in contrast, when you’re an expert, most of what you need to know is stored in long-term memory and you can complete the task automatically.

So COVID-19 has robbed you of the ability to do things on auto. Take a work meeting for example, before, you would just have turned up and joined in the discussion, but now if you’re working remotely you have to fire up your video-conferencing software, worry about your Wi-Fi and so on. The same applies to domestic challenges too, like ordering your groceries online instead of shopping in person. These adaptations force you out of auto-pilot and draw on your limited working memory capacity.

【推荐3】Many regions in China have introduced COVID-19 vaccination (接种疫苗) among children aged 3 to 11. Kids are encouraged to take it and the project is progressing, which might be important to stopping the spread of the coronavirus.     1    

Why do children get the same dosage (剂量) as adults?

When children get sick, they are generally given a reduced dosage. Many parents are worried that the same COVID-19 vaccine dosage will be a burden on the small body. So there is need for proper dose in children.     2    . The process of vaccines taking effect has no relation with the weight and body surface area of the receiver. In fact, for the majority of vaccines, the recommended doses for both babies and adults are the same.

Can children have full immunity (免疫力) after receiving the COVID-19 vaccine?

Some parents doubt whether vaccinating children aged 3 to 11 can produce the due immune effect as their immune systems are still developing. Actually, vaccines can work exactly the same in both children and adults. The vaccine will produce a near 100 percent immune response in children.    3     So the same vaccination strategy has been adopted for all age groups in China.

    4    

A vaccine has to go through a strict procedure before being widely used in a specific age group. Enough data need to be collected to get emergency use or come onto the market. So the medical experiments have to be considered in advance. China has carried out a series of such studies. Based on research resnlts, the risk of negative reactions in children is no higher than that of adults.

    5    . So far the most frequently reported three negative reactions are fever, pain and tiredness. At present, the government is planning to study children as young as 6 months old in the future.

【推荐1】Dwayne Johnson said this week he returned to a 7-Eleven in Hawaii to “right the wrong” of stealing candy when he was a teenager.

In an Instagram post, the star explained that his family was “broke as hell” when he was living on the island and, for nearly a year when he was 14, he would steal a Snickers (士力架) bar from the store on the way to the gym “every day” as his pre-workout snack because he couldn’t afford to buy one.

He recalled that “the same clerk was there every day and always just turned her head and never searched me”, but admitted that his actions had been weighing on his conscience (良心) for three decades.

Johnson documented the recent visit to the store, in which he emptied the shelves of every Snickers bar, bought them and then left the candy bars for any customer to take for free.

“If somebody looks like they’re stealing Snickers, give them these so they don’t steal it,” Johnson told the store clerk.

He wrote that he realized the deed might seem “silly”, but every time he came back home to Hawaii and drove by 7-Eleven, he always knew he needed to go in and clean out every Snickers bar they had — the right way.

Johnson racked up a bill of $298 and also tipped the clerk who had to count the dozens of bars he bought and another cashier who was working at the time. The former wrestling star even posed for selfies with fans while trying to film the visit.

“We can’t change the past and some of the dumb stuff we may have done, but every once in a while we can do something to make up for that fault — and maybe put a big smile on some strangers’ faces,” Johnson said.