【推荐1】In recent years, many students from China have gone to the UK to attend school. Over 4,000 new students went in 2018 alone. Quite a few decide to apply to a UK university after attending British secondary schools.     1    , find out more about a different culture and to experience very high-quality teaching.

Studying in the UK is a unique and enjoyable experience.     2    . Its furthest mainland points are only 1,350 km apart.     3    , such as London, Cambridge and Oxford. You are never more than 113 km from the sea and can explore Britain’s 18,000 km of coastline.

Life for a student studying in the UK can be very exciting.     4    . At 11, children go to secondary school where they may study 10 subjects including maths, sciences, English, history and one or more languages such as French. Classes in UK schools often have between 20 or 30 students. Most schools do not make students sit in the same seat for every lesson.

Children do not just learn from books or a screen, but enjoy a range of sports as part of their normal day, such as soccer, rugby, field hockey (曲棍球) and cricket (板球).     5    .

【推荐1】Fashion and Identity

For hundreds of years people have put some message in the type of clothing they wore. Long ago people started wanting to stand out from the “crowd” and be different from other people by means of changing their clothing. Some examples of these “standing out” became very popular and were followed by more people.    1    Nowadays, fashion has become a necessary part of one’s self-realization and clothing is basically a covering designed to be worn on a person’s body. This covering is a “necessity”, which brings a lot of variety into the lives of people and makes their image more complete.

The type of clothing completely depends on the person wearing it and becomes a reflection of personal identity. Lately, a lot is being heard about its meaning in the life of every single person on the planet. The choice of clothing is as important as identification through the color of hair, skin and gender. As every piece of clothing carries a strong message about its owner, every owner “nests” a certain value in it depending on his mindset or today’s mood. Therefore, the clothing of a person is a means of communication with the outside world.    2    

Clothes have a significant impact on the understanding of the people nearby as well as the person wearing them. For instance, a suit can make a person feel more confident and organized, which would eventually change even the gestures of the person.     3     Sometimes, fashion may play a vital role in a person’s life, especially when the person is applying for the job he wants. Fashion also creates a message that is required by a situation the person finds himself in. This can be simply proved by analyzing one’s reaction on people wearing different types of clothing.    4     Thus, even the smallest companies make wearing a suit one of the requirements for their employees.

    5     Fashion, with all its symbolism and features, form an outstanding base for personal and cultural identification. It is a part of the self-realization that is required for finding a place in life and has become a tool for achieving harmony with the inner world. The more diverse the society around us, the more fashion-trend will appear and surprise us.

【推荐3】A lot of students around the world have to wear uniforms every day, but dress codes are not the same in every country.    1    

Not all children like to wear uniforms in their everyday life. When I was a school girl, I had to wear a uniform. It was a dark brown dress with a black apron. I couldn’t wear anything else. All the girls in my country had to wear this uniform.    2    

I remember how I hated to put on my uniform every morning. I couldn’t even use colorful hairpins because colorful things were prohibited. All the pupils looked the same, and nobody liked that uniform.

My friends and I talked about it very often.     3     All we wanted was to feel comfortable and to be different from other children.

Nowadays, the dress code in my country has changed. There are no more uniforms.     4     For example, my younger brother, who is a high school student, now likes to wear jeans because they are comfortable, and he doesn’t want to change back to a uniform.

    5     If children prefer to wear colorful clothes, adults should permit them to do so. Kids have to enjoy going to school. That is why everything has to be done to make pupils feel comfortable at school.

【推荐1】Picture this: You’re at a movie theater food stand loading up on snacks. You have a choice of a small, medium or large soda. The small is $3.50 and the large is $5.50. It’s tough decision: The small size may not last yon through the whole movie, but $5.50 for some sugary drink seems ridiculous. But there’s a third option, a medium soda for $5.25. Medium may be the perfect amount of soda for you, but the large is only a quarter more. If you’re like most people, you end up buying the large.

If you’re wondering who would buy the medium soda, the answer is almost no one. In fact, there’s a good chance the marketing department purposely priced the medium soda as a decoy (诱饵), making you more likely to buy the large soda rather than the small.

I have written about this unique human nature before with my friend Ariely, who studied this phenomenon extensively after noticing pricing for subscription (订阅) to Geography. The digital subscription was $59, the print subscription was $125, and the print plus digital subscription was also $125. No one in their right mind would buy the print subscription when you could get digital as well for the same price, so why was it even an option? Ariely ran an experiment and found that when only the two “real” choices were offered, more people chose the less-expensive digital subscription. But the addition of the bad option made people much more likely to choose the more expensive print plus digital option.

Brain scientist call this effect “asymmetric dominance” and it means that people are attracted toward the choice nearest a clearly inferior (较差的) option. Marketing professors call it the decoy effect, which is certainly easier to remember. It works because of the way our brains assign value when making choices. Value is almost never absolute; rather, we decide an object’s value relative to our other choices. If more options are introduced, the value equation (方程) changes.

【推荐2】As the world’s population grows, farmers will need to produce more and more food. And large farms are increasingly using precision farming to increase yields (产量), reduce waste, and reduce the economic and security risks that inevitably accompany agricultural uncertainty.

Traditional farming relies on managing entire fields—making decisions related to planting, harvesting, irrigating, and applying pesticides and fertilizer (农药和化肥)—based on regional conditions and historical data. Precision farming, by contrast, combines sensors, robots, GPS, mapping tools and data-analytics software to customize（量身定制）the care that plants receive without increasing labor. Robot-mounted sensors and camera-equipped drones (无人机) wirelessly send images and data on individual plants to a computer, which looks for signs of health and stress. Farmers receive the feedback in real time and then deliver water, pesticide or fertilizer in adjusted doses（剂量）to only the areas that need it. The technology can also help farmers decide when to plant and harvest crops.

As a result, precision farming can improve time management, reduce water and chemical use, and produce healthier crops and higher yields—all of which benefit farmers’ bottom lines and conserve resources while reducing chemical runoff.

Many small businesses are developing new software, sensors, and other tools for precision farming, as are large companies such as Monsanto, John Deere, Bayer, Dow and DuPont. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration all support precision farming, and many colleges now offer course work on the topic.

In a related development, seed producers are applying technology to improve plant characteristics. By following individual plants over time and analyzing which ones flourish in different conditions, companies can relate the plants’ response to their environments with their genomics (基因组学). That information, in turn, allows the companies to produce seed varieties that will grow well in specific soil and weather conditions. This advanced technology may also help to improve crop nutrition.

Farmers do not universally welcome precision agriculture for various reasons, such as high equipment costs and lack of access to the Internet. The technology may bring great challenges to experienced farmers who are not good at computers. And large systems will also be beyond the reach of many small farming operations in developing nations. But less expensive, simpler systems could potentially be applied. For others, though, cost savings in the long run may reduce the financial concerns. And however reticent some farmers may be to adopt new technology, the next generation of farmers are likely to warm to the approach.

【推荐3】Search “toxic parents”, and you’ll find more than 38, 000 posts, largely urging young adults to cut ties with their families. The idea is to safeguard one’s mental health from offensive parents. However, as a psychoanalyst (精神分析学家), I’ve seen that trend in recent years become a way to manage conflicts in the family, and I have seen the severe impacts estrangement (疏远) has on both sides of the divide. This is a self-help trend that creates much harm.

“Canceling” your parent can be seen as an extension of a cultural trend aimed at correcting imbalances in power and systemic inequality. Today’s social justice values respond to this reality, calling on us to criticize oppressive and harmful figures and to gain power for those who have been powerless. But when adult children use the most effective tool they have—themselves—to gain a sense of security and ban their parents from their lives, the roles are simply switched, and the pain only deepens.

Often, what I see in my practice are cases of family conflict mismanaged, power dynamics turned upside down rather than negotiated. I see the terrible effect of that trend: situations with no winners, only isolated humans who long to be known and feel safe in the presence of the other.

The catch is that after estrangement, adult children are not suddenly less dependent. In fact, they feel abandoned and betrayed, because in the unconscious, it doesn’t matter who is doing the leaving; the feeling that remains is “being left”. They carry the ghosts of their childhood, tackling the emotional reality that those who raised us can never truly be left behind, no matter how hard we try.

What I have found is that most of these families need repair, not permanent break-up. How can one learn how to negotiate needs, to create boundaries and to trust? How can we love others, and ourselves, if not through accepting the limitations that come with being human? Good relationships are not the result of a perfect level of harmony but rather of successful adjustments.

To pursue dialogue instead of estrangement will be hard and painful work. It can’t be a single project of “self-help”, because at the end of the day, real intimacy (亲密关系) is achieved by working through the injuries of the past together. In most cases of family conflict, repair is possible and preferable to estrangement—and it’s worth the work.

【推荐1】China’s Tianwen 1 Mars probe (探测器) conducted its fourth orbital correction on Friday evening, as the spacecraft makes ready for its arrival in orbit around Feb. 10, according to the China National Space Administration.

The name comes from the long poem Tianwen, meaning Heavenly Questions or Questions to Heaven, written by Qu Yuan, one of the greatest poets of ancient China. In Tianwen, this name conveys the Chinese nation’s steady effort in pursuing truth and culture of exploring nature and the universe. CNSA also unveiled ( 发 布 ) the logo of China’s planetary exploration missions, featuring the letter C, signifying China, international cooperation and capacity of entering space.

Tianwen I has flown for 197 days and more than 465 million kilometers on its journey to the planet. It is now around 184 million km from Earth and I. 1 million km from Mars. Depending on the two planets’ orbits, Mars is between 55 and 400 million km from Earth. Mars probe Tianwen I is seen in its first selfies in space on Oct. 1, 2020. The administration also published a black-and-white picture of Mars taken by Tianwen I, the first snapshot (抓拍的照片) from the Chinese craft.

Tianwen I, the country’s first independent Mars mission, was launched by a Long March 5 heavy-lift carrier rocket on July 23 from the Wenchang Space Launch Center in Hainan province, kicking off the nation’s planetary exploration program.

A successful landing would make China only the second nation to place a spacecraft on the Martian planet. China would also be the first to successfully orbit, land and deploy ( 部署) a vehicle in the same mission. According to experts, searching for signs of life on Mars will be the first and foremost scientific goal. China is open and inclusive in the development of its space technology not least because it believes that the exploration of outer space should help build a community with a shared future for mankind.

【推荐2】Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft, which has been transporting all astronauts to and from the International Space Station（ISS）since 2011, typically carries a crew of three. However, the MS-14 capsule launched（发射）from a Russian spaceport in southern Kazakhstan on August 22, 2019, had just one passenger—a human-like robot named Skybot F-850.

The robot is the latest version of Russia’s FEDOR robots, which were initially designed to help with search and rescue efforts. Skybot is good at many human skills, including driving a car, having short conversations, and even telling jokes. But since it lacks some special sills, the spacecraft to the ISS was piloted from the ground by scientists from Russia’s space Agency. Roscosmos.

The six-foot-tall, 350-pound robot had another important task while on board. Without risking the lives of human astronauts, it helped Roscosmos researchers test the safety and flight experience of the new Soyuz-2.1, a carrier rocket, which carried the spacecraft into orbit. The feedback（反馈）will be important in determining if the rocket is safe to transport future human crews to space.

Though the launch into orbit went smoothly, Skybot’s arrival at the ISS was delayed by three days, from August 24 to August 27. The delay didn’t seem to bother the robot, which announced its arrival, “Sorry about the delay. Met with traffic. Ready to work now.”

Skybot’s two-week task is largely a test to measure its ability to work effectively in microgravity, and includes simple tasks like using tools. If all goes well, Russia hopes to send more advanced versions of the FEDOR robots to help astronauts with special tasks.

Earlier this year, the US space agency launched two little robots called Astrobees to help astronauts with daily chores, like finding lost pieces of equipment. Meanwhile, the European Space Agency’s social AI-powered CIMON spent a year assisting astronauts, before returning to Earth on August 27, 2019.

【推荐3】This year’s flu season is pretty scary. To try to minimize the effects, public officials are still urging anyone who hasn’t yet gotten their flu shot to get one as soon as possible. However, even if every single person got a shot in the arm, the vaccine(疫 苗)—with its excellent 36 percent effectiveness—would not prevent everyone from getting infected with the annoying virus. Knowledge is power, so here's what goes on in your body when you come down with the flu.

The influenza virus primarily attacks your nose, throat, and the tubes that lead to your lungs. But the flu is so much more than that. Your muscles ache, your head hurts, and your appetite goes down, among other things. To our surprise, almost all of these symptoms   have   less   to   do   with   the   virus   itself   than   with   your   immune( 免 疫 的)response to them. Unfortunately, the very defense you have in place to get rid of the flu is the reason you feel so painful when you recover.

The virus usually enters through your mouth, typically by way of your hands . But it takes a few days for symptoms to set in. While this process might cause some harm to your nose and throat, it's nothing major, and nothing like the symptoms that typically accompany a bad or even mild case of the flu.

The real fun starts when your immune system begins to fight. Your immune system comes in two parts: the innate system and the adaptive. The innate immune system is essentially an all-purpose tool. As soon as your body senses the presence of any injury or invader , the innate immune system launches into action by producing tiny proteins called cytokines and chemokines. The cytokines reproduce almost immediately and start to attack the virus. This increase in immune cells creates a serious inflammation( 炎 症 ) throughout the body. But the worst is still to come.

Meanwhile, the chemokines work with the adaptive immune system to help create T cells. These cells are a special type of white blood cell that works in a much more specific way: They find the influenza virus, identify what's special about it, and create something unique on their surface that finds and destroys similar invaders.