【推荐3】Last night I entered a poetry competition. It was very rushed. It was the very last minute and I was unprepared. Yet I really wanted to do it. So, without the support of my family, I got up in front of a group of people and got ready to present my poem. But I didn’t expect to win.

Judges were chosen from the audience by having a bouncy ball thrown out into their midst to see who would catch it. As it is with most competitions, performers had 2 minutes to impress the judges who would then give a score from 0.0 to 10. There were five judges. I was the youngest person in the competition. I’m only 16 and everybody else was about 20—70. My poem went really well. People liked it and I think many were impressed by my courage to get up on stage and perform my own work. In the end, I came third, but I was not disappointed. After all, it was only 0.3 points that separated me from second place.

When it was all over, I was waiting in the car park for my dad to pick me up. One of the judges came up to me and told me I had done a fantastic job. Even though many people had congratulated me, this was different. The lady judge was very sincere. She said, “Here, have the ball, so you remember tonight”. I pulled a smile card out for the woman thanking her for her words and the ball. She was impressed by the card, but no words passed between us. It was a silent understanding. Words would ruin the moment.

My father beeped from the car park so I nodded my goodbye and got in the car, holding in my hand the bouncy ball that changed me.

【推荐1】NASA scientists using virtual reality technology are redefining our understanding about how our galaxy (银河系) works.

Using customized, 3D virtual reality (vr) simulation (模拟) that animated the speed and direction of 4 million stars in the local Milky Way neighborhood, astronomer Marc Kuchner and researcher Susan Higashio obtained a new perspective on the stars’ motions, improving our understanding of star groupings.

Astronomers have come to different conclusions about the same groups of stars from studying them in six dimensions using paper graphs, Higashio said. Groups of stars moving together indicate to astronomers that they originated at the same time and place, which can help us understand how our galaxy evolved.

Goddard’s virtual reality team, managed by Thomas Grubb, animated those same stars, revolutionizing the classification process and making the groupings easier to see, Higashio said. They found stars that may have been classified into the wrong groups as well as star groups that could belong to larger groupings.

“Rather than look up one database and then another database, why not fly there and look at them all together,” Higashio said. She watched these simulations hundreds, maybe thousands of times, and said the associations between the groups of stars became more intuitive inside the artificial cosmos (宇宙) found within the VR headset. Observing stars in VR will redefine astronomer’s understanding of some individual stars as well as star groupings.

The 3D visualization helped her and Kuchner open a window into the past. “We often find groups of young stars moving together, suggesting that they all formed at the same time,” Kuchner said. “The thinking is they represent a star-formation event. They were all formed in the same place at the same time and so they move together.”

【推荐3】Thomas Edison was one often said to be the greatest genius of his age. There are only a few men in all of the history, who have changed the lives of other men as much as the inventor of the first useful electric light. But Edison could never be happy only because someone said he was a genius.“ There is no such thing as genius,” Edison said. He said that what people called genius was mostly hard work.

But Edison was a dreamer as well as a worker. From his earliest days as a child he wondered about the secrets of nature. Nature, he often said, is full of secrets. He tried to understand them; then, he tried to learn what could usefully be done with them.

Edison enjoyed thinking. He knew that most people will do almost anything instead of the difficult work of thinking, especially if they do not think very often. But he knew, too, that thinking can give men enjoyment and pleasure.

Edison could not understand how anyone could be uninterested in life. As he loved to think, he also loved to work. On the day he became 75 years old, someone asked him what ideas he had about life. “Work,” he answered. “Discovering the secrets of nature and using them to make men happier.” He said he had enough inventions in his mind to give him another 100 years of work.