【推荐2】81-year-old Harry Smith of Port St. Lucie, Florida takes his 9-year-old dog Sarah Jane for a walk around the lake across the street from his house twice a day, every day. Smith, who uses an electric wheelchair to get around, was on one of his regular walks earlier this month when something out of the ordinary happened. The left wheel of his wheelchair got stuck in some loose mud (泥土), and as he tried to reverse (倒车)out of it, his wheelchair lost balance. He ended up turning over his wheelchair and rolling down the bank into the lake.

Sensing her owner was in trouble, Sarah Jane began barking (吠叫)loudly as Smith struggled to keep his head above the water. Her continuous barking caught the attention of two neighbors working in their driveway across the street, who rushed over to see what was wrong.

One of those men was Edward Shuling, who said in the beginning he thought the dog might have gotten into a fight with a crocodile (鳄鱼), before he saw Smith's head sticking out of the water.“Immediately I just jumped in,”Shuling told TCPalm.“It's just a natural reaction.”A second neighbor, Aby“Jacob”Chacko, was following closely behind and happened to spot Officer Adam Doty on his way down to the water. Together, the three men pulled Smith out of the water and back to safety, much to his—and Sarah Jane's—relief.

With no serious injuries, Smith was cleared to go home but his electric wheelchair was no longer working due to water damage. And in a post showing the sweet moment by the Port St. Lucie Police Department, Officer Doty and Sarah Jane, of course, helped Smith get back to his house.“We are thankful to Mr. Smith's dog and the two passers-by that helped save his life!”the post reads.

【推荐3】This year at the Olympic Games in Rio, you might stumble across a pretty interesting sight outside the various stadiums holding competitions around the city, and meet Chen Guanming, a 60-year-old Chinese farmer who pedaled his rickshaw (人力车) all the way from China to Rio.

He calls himself “Olympic madman” and surely he deserves it: this is the third Olympic Games he rode to. Brazilians welcomed him with the best friendship and a splendid show after he arrived in Rio a week earlier.

Seventeen years ago, he embarked on the crazy adventure as an Olympics chaser: he toured around China before attending the Beijing Olympics in 2008, then made it to London in 2012, and now he’s in Rio. He plans to finish his global journey in Tokyo for the 2020 Olympics.

He doesn’t really have money, but strangers he met on the road have been pouring support to him: a heartfelt encouragement, a warm meal, or a lift up a hill — the rickshaw, his good buddy, carries all his luggage and weighs as heavy as 400 pounds.

Zsofia Korodi, a Hungarian living in London, set up a Facebook fan page after “inspired by his actions”, so that supporters could keep track of him. That way his journeys were pieced together, and people called out the next town to look out for and take care of him. When there’s water to cross, people he met flew him over, and he would patiently wait for the rickshaw to arrive by ship.

Chen spent two years traveling almost 40,000 miles to get to the London Olympics. For Rio, he hopped a plane to Canada and then made his way from Canada through the US, South America to Rio. Chen said he did it all to promote the Olympic spirit. “My biggest hope is to encourage the vulnerable, the weak, and those who are afraid of challenges.”

In Rio, he’s apparently becoming an Olympic celebrity — a sportsman that competes out of the fields, with himself and gets stopped wherever he goes to take pictures. Even though he couldn’t watch the games at the scene, he’s completely happy by helping to pick up trash and clean the surrounding areas of the stadiums. That’s what the Olympics are about, in his own words, “to challenge the boundaries, compete in a friendly manner, and win the honor of the higher calling.”

【推荐1】When I was 12 years old, I already knew that my teen years were going to be the worst years of my life. I was a total outsider, bullied (欺凌) at school. I felt completely alone in my small town. But by starting to do volunteer work when I was 14, I turned my problem into helping others. The opportunity to practice kindness made me feel like my life had a greater purpose. The more positive energy I shared, the more kindness and appreciation I received. I realized that my purpose in life would be to reach out to people, specifically teenagers, and help them feel less alone.

Books were my true friends back then. I was so thankful that the authors wrote those books. The kindness they offered me with their books saved my life. One of my biggest dreams was to become an author so I could write books that would help other teenagers the way those books helped me.

After surviving terrible experiences at school and at home, I made a choice to take the optimistic and positive road in the next steps of my journey. My dream career, which I thought was only possible for the authors I loved, is what I am doing now. I have been a full-time author of teen novels since 2007 and am grateful for this amazing opportunity to reach out to readers every single day.

Kindness saved me when I needed help the most. Even small acts of kindness can change someone’s life. You never know what someone else is going through. But by practicing daily kindness, you become an architect of positive change.

【推荐2】It is true that human beings need some rest to stay alive, but it doesn’t matter when and how much a person sleeps. And that’s what all doctors thought, until they heard about Herpin. Herpin, it was said, never slept. Could this be true? The doctors decided to see this strange man themselves.

When the doctors paid a visit to him in his home in New Jersey, he was 90 years old. They thought for sure that he got some sleep of some kind. So they stayed with him and watched every movement he made. But they were surprised. Though they watched him hour after hour and day after day, they never saw him sleeping. In fact, he did not even own a bed. He never needed one.

The only rest that Herpin sometimes got was sitting in a comfortable chair and reading newspapers. The doctors were puzzled by this strange continuous sleeplessness. They asked him many questions, hoping to find an answer. They found only one answer that might explain his condition. Herpin remembered some talk about his mother having been injured several days before he was born. But that was all. Was this the real reason? No one could be sure. Herpin died at the age of 94.

【推荐3】When I was a little girl, I was foolish enough to believe everything adults said. Even I was scared to death by a word my mother said.

It all started when my elder brother came home with a heavy bag of cherries（樱桃）a friend gave him. In order to spend a pleasant afternoon, my sister suggested we have a competition to see who could eat the most cherries in as short a time as possible and be the winner. We all jumped at her idea, and the competition began in no time. Our action had to be fast and we must know how to bite in the middle of the cherry to chew and spit the seed out losing no time. I realized that this wasn’t a good game to play. And I suddenly found that I have swallowed more than one seed down to my stomach. Then Mother came and laughed and said to me, “tonight when you sleep, a cherry tree will grow out from your head.” I was jittery and scared. I believed every word she said at that age. I was rather frightened that night thinking how I was going to make it to school the next morning if I had a tree on top of my head or how I would leave this world just like that because of the cherry seeds in my stomach. I couldn’t sleep the whole night.

Well, the next morning, I woke up to my surprise , and discovered nothing had changed. My head was normal as it was. But one thing remains unchanged until this day. My love for cherries stays forever.

【推荐1】The Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, in the UK, are home to thousands of fascinating plants, but none are as lonely as the Encephalartos woodii (伍德苏铁), an ancient cycad species and, most likely, the last one of its kind.

It was in 1895 that botanist John Wood noticed this interesting looking palm tree on a steep slope in southern Africa. Spellbound by its multiple trunks and arched palm fronds, Dr. Wood — who made his living collecting rare plants — had some stems removed and sent to London in a box. It ended up in the Palm House at the Royal Botanical Gardens, where it has been waiting for a mate for over a century. Despite numerous efforts to find it a mate, the Encephalartos woodii at Kew remains alone, unable to produce an offspring and reproduce its species. For this reason, many consider it the world’s loneliest plant.

Two hundred million years ago, when dinosaurs still roamed the world, cycads were everywhere. They made up around 20% of plants, acted as shelter for some dinosaur species and as food supply for others. They managed to somehow survive five ice ages, adapted to coexist with new species of plants, but as time passed, their numbers dwindled. Like all other cycads, Encephalartos woodii went from numbering millions of specimens, to thousands, and today, possibly just one, a male.

Some plants have both male and female organs, but not Encephalartos woodii. Without a female specimen to produce the seeds, it can never mate.

The Encephalartos woodii is technically not the last of its kind. It has been cloned several times, and its clones can be found in several botanical gardens around the world. It can even mate with some closely related species, but it can’t produce a true offspring. It just sits there, the last of its ancient species waiting for a female species to be found somewhere on Earth. “Surely this is the loneliest organism in the world,” biologist Richard Fortey once wrote, “growing older, alone, and fated to have no successors. Nobody knows how long it will live.”

【推荐3】We're all familiar with migration (迁徙): Wildebeests dash across Africa, Monarch butterflies fly across the Americas… but did you know that forests migrate, too?

In his new book The Journeys of Trees, science writer Zach St. George explores a very slow migration, as forests creep inch by inch to more pleasant places.

"The migration of a forest is just many trees sprouting (发芽) in the same direction,” St George writes "Through the fossils that ancient forests left behind, scientists can track their movement over thousands of years.They move back and forth across continents,sometimes following the same route more than once, like migrating birds or whales." This has happened over thousands of years, and climate tends to be the driving force.

Of course, today, climate change is seeding up, and tees can't keep pace. Take California for example, it's getting hotter and dryer and scientists estimate that before too long. Sequoia National Park may not be able to keep giant sequoias (巨杉).

"The scientists there had never seen anything like it," St. George says. "They worried, and I think at some point we will lose these ancient trees and we will have to think about what we do with the places, and do we plant new groves where they are easy to grow?"

This is known as "assisted migration" -humans planting trees in other places where they're more likely to flourish. But this process carries risks people can accidentally introduce insects and diseases to new places, where they may wipe out entire native populations. So, St. George writes, there's a debate among conservationists and foresters today: Should humans help the trees escape?

"There may be cases where people are probably going to step in and help species move to places where they'll be more suitable in the future," St. George says. "So far, there are no huge movements of citizen groups moving trees north. But that is kind of one vision of the future that the people I interview sort of hope to see."