【推荐2】The family of a 6-year-old adopted Chinese girl who badly needs a bone marrow transplant (骨髓移植) believes they have found a match in China.

Kailee Wells suffers from a serious aplastic anemia (再生障碍性贫血), which prevents bone marrow from producing new blood cells. She has taken courses of treatment but has shown little sign of recovery.

The best help for such patients is a transplant of healthy marrow or blood cells from a suitable donor. Certain tissue of the patient and the donor must match.

Kailee’s mother, Linda Wells, made her second trip to China earlier this month to find a donor. Her husband, Owen Wells, said that his wife believed doctors there had found a match.

“For these last 22 months, we’ve been living in fear that Kailee would take a turn for the worse and there would be nothing we could do about it,” he said. “Now we have something we can use and save our little girl. We are just about ready to start jumping up and down and rejoicing.”

Wells said a Chinese girl who is about a year old has a blood sample that matches Kailee’s perfectly. The next step, he said, would be to make sure the sample is safely harvested and protected for transplant, the details of which have yet to be worked out.

Linda Wells first traveled to China in February to try to locate the girl’s birth mother, who is likely to be a match. But she found no relatives and decided to try again this month.

“This gives us so much encouragement because now we found what we thought we would never be able to find for Kailee,” Owen Wells said. “We’re going to continue our blood donor drive to try to continue to help as many people as we possibly can. We’re just so happy.”

【推荐3】People in the United States honor their parents with two special days：Mother’s Day, on the second Sunday in May, and Father’s Day, on the third Sunday in June. These days are set aside to show love and respect for parents. They raise their children and educate them to be responsible(有责任感的) citizens. They give love and care. These two days make us think about the changing roles of mothers and fathers. More mothers now work outside the home. More fathers must help with child care.

These two special days are celebrated in many different ways. On Mother’s Day people wear carnations. A red one symbolizes a living mother. A white one shows that the mother is dead. Many people attend religious services to honor parents. It is also a day when people whose parents are dead visit the cemetery(墓地).On these days families get together at home, as well as in restaurants. They often have outdoor barbecues for Father’s Day. These are days of fun and good feelings and memories.

Another tradition is to give cards and gifts. Children make them in school. Many people make their own presents. These are valued more than the ones bought in stores. It is not the value of the gift that is important, but it is “the thought that counts”. Greeting card stores, florists, candy makers, bakeries, telephone companies, and other stores do a lot of business during these holidays.

【推荐1】Just like humans, birds too rely on sound to communicate. However, they do not have a “language” in the true sense of the word and instead produce a variety of sounds to convey different emotions.

Often, birds recognize their mates(or young) by sound rather than sight. Hungry young birds use begging calls to let their mothers know it is feeding time. Alarm calls, flight calls and warning calls are other sounds made frequently by adults.

A new study shows that songbirds rehearse(排演) their songs even in their sleep. The activity in the brain of the birds when asleep is similar to the brain activity when the birds were awake and singing. The team used tiny recording devices to measure the activity of individual brain cells in four songbirds both when they were singing and when they were asleep.

Apparently the bird stores a song after hearing it, and then rehearses it later in its sleep. Scientists now believe the birds “dream of songs and tunes” to help them master the fine art of singing and that sleep plays a key role in the learning process!

Many songbirds learn to sing listening to adult birds of the same species. However, if separated from the adults, the young birds develop sounds which are hard to understand instead of normal song patterns. Researchers carried out an experiment in which a male bullfinch (灰雀) was raised by a female canary(金丝雀). The bullfinch soon learned the canary’s song and when it was later mated to a female bullfinch, Mr.Bullfinch taught his children the canary’s songs.

Last year, a British survey of London’s songbirds showed that the city’s birds are losing their tunes. Birds could hardly hear one another, over the traffic noise; as a result, instead of copying the sweet notes of the adults, young birds were copying the sounds they heard most often, namely car horns and beeping cellphones!