【推荐1】It was National Adoption Day. The pet store was working with the Lexington Humane Society to find good homes for abandoned dogs and cats. After endless pleas (恳求) from my sons, Mark and Luke, I decided to stop in. I didn’t know it at the time but adopting a homeless dog would really make me feel better. I was struggling with depression. We’d moved from Ohio to Kentucky. Ohio had been my home for forty years, and I missed my parents, friends and the familiarity of home.

Inside the pet store, there were rows of cages filled with furry animals. I spotted ours immediately: a two-year-old female Jack Russell named Princess. I looked into her cage. She pushed her nose toward the cage, sniffed and then lowered her head. Trembling in her cage, she seemed unsure of her surroundings. I wondered if Princess felt that way when she’d been brought here, surrounded by people she didn’t know. Is that why she was shaking so hard? It made me want her.

“Let’s adopt her,” I said. My sons couldn’t contain their excitement, “We want her!” My husband also agreed. After I filled out the paperwork, we took Princess home. She barely ate and didn’t bark the first few days, but gradually she relaxed.

One afternoon, I was about to doze off (打盹) when I felt Princess jump on the bed. She was like a friend next to me. Actually, after adopting Princess, I felt better. While I still missed my parents and friends, I started making friends and visiting places in Kentucky.

When my son Luke turned seven, we had a birthday party. While I was making the cupcakes, Princess settled on the floor next to me. She was taking in everything: the sounds of children laughing, the smell of food and two of my new friends sitting at the kitchen table. She looked around and then up at me and wagged her tail. I thought it was her way of saying, “I’m finally home” And you know what? She was right. We were both home.

【推荐3】Susan Casado felt well prepared to have a birthday party of 15 to 20 guests for her son, Shemy, who celebrated his fourth birthday on Saturday. But after none of the boy's friends arrived, she never expected she'd be hosting nearly 100 surprise guests at her home.

Susan tells Yahoo Lifestyle that she was disappointed when her brother was the only person to show up at the party at first. After seeing that she had tears in her eyes, however, Shemy's uncle connected with a local Facebook group to call for more people to join the celebration. Moments later, a woman arrived at Susan's home asking for the birthday boy, although the family had never met her before.

As people continued to arrive, the mother realized that her brother had something to do with it, and was then shown a Facebook post that he made to advertise the party.

After more unexpected guests continued to arrive, however, Susan began to worry about the amount of food that she had prepared. "I felt so embarrassed," she explains. But guests didn't care about the food and drinks. Instead, they told the birthday boy's mother that they were there to "make Shemy's day", which even got better once the guests of honor arrived from St. Johns County Fire Rescue.

"My first thought was, 'Is everybody okay? Is anybody hurt?' And then they said, 'We're coming here to say happy birthday to Shemy,'" Susan says. "They said, 'We brought you a big toy, we brought you a fire truck.'"

Susan went on to explain that although Shemy has Down syndrome and isn't able to say much, he does express his happiness with laughter and hugs. "He hugs when he feels happy, so when people came in to meet him, we took pictures together and he hugged them. This is the way that he says thank you."

When Susan asked her brother why he went through the extra effort to make sure that his nephew's party was amazing. She says that he told her, "He should have a good birthday." As for the firefighters, who attended, they told the family that it's all part of the job. One of the firefighters, Jeremy Robshaw, tells Yahoo Lifestyle that they just wanted to "bring a smile" to Shemy's face.

【推荐3】Katalin Karikó, a Nobel Prize Winner of this year, has had an unlikely journey. The daughter of a butcher in postwar communist Hungary, Karikó grew up in a home that lacked running water, and her family grew their own vegetables. She saw the wonders of nature all around her and was determined to become a scientist. That determination eventually brought her to the United States, where she arrived as a postdoctoral follow in 1985 with $1,200 sewn into her toddler’s teddy bear and a dream to remake medicine.

Karikó battled cockroaches (蟑螂) in a windowless lab, and faced being laughed at open and direct from her bosses and colleagues. She hesitated as prestigious research institutions increasingly combined science and money together. Despite setbacks, she never doubted her belief that an underappreciated molecule   (分子) called messenger RNA could change the world. She sacrificed nearly everything for this dream, and the obstacles she faced only motivated her, so eventually she succeeded.

Karikó’s three-decade-long investigation into mRNA would lead to a surprising achievement: vaccines that protected millions of people from the most serious consequences of COVID-19. These vaccines are just the beginning of mRNA’s potential. Today, the medical community eagerly awaits more mRNA vaccines — for the flu, HIV, and other emerging infectious diseases.

Breaking Through isn’t just the story of an extraordinary woman. It’s a charge of closed-minded thinking and a demonstration to one woman’s commitment to laboring intensely in obscurity — knowing she might never be recognized in a culture that is driven by prestige, power, and privilege — because she believed her work would save lives.