【推荐1】Every year, students across the U.K.engage in the annual ritual (仪式) of telling college and university admissions officers why they deserve a seat at the school of their choice.However, this task is filled with anxiety and fear.    1     This, of course, leads many to ask the question: How should I write an essay about myself for college? Here are tips to keep in mind.

    2     For example, if all your friends are writing application essays about covid-19, that may be a good reason why you should avoid it.Unless, of course, you’ve had a vivid, life-changing experience that you are burning to share.Admissions counselors say that the best essays help them learn something about the candidate that they would never know from reading the rest of the application.

Keep your individuality in the spotlight.    3     What sets you apart from others? Tell your extraordinary story but remember not to oversell yourself.Your reader wants to see something personal about you, something that makes you stand out among others.Imagine how many applications the admissions committee reads per day, and think twice before writing some general information that doesn’t show your individuality.

Committees value authenticity.They want to hear your voice.This essay may give you the time and space to explain why a particular achievement means too much to you.But resist the urge to exaggerate: admission counselors read thousands of essays each year.    4              

Sound like yourself.Don’t use words you wouldn’t normally use.Don’t use fancy language you wouldn’t use in real life.Imagine yourself reading this essay out loud to a classroom full of people who have never met you.    5     Be on the lookout for words and phrases like ‘maybe’ ‘sort of’ ‘I think’ or anything else.

【推荐2】School Spirit Week can be held any time throughout the year in America. It is a special time when youthful exuberance (活力) is allowed full expression.

    1    There are spirit band sessions, spirit assemblies and spirit teams that have one primary goal. That goal is to promote school tradition and encourage students to recognize their school as an important part of their life.    2    Some schools will use it as a kick-off for a charity (慈善) event such as collecting food for the local food bank.

A Spirit Week program can include many types of supporting activities. At most events, students like to wear identifying clothing or articles that show they are a unified group and support their school. Spirit week agendas often encourage students to wear fun and modern clothes.    3    Monday might be funny hat day, followed by Tuesday's Hawaiian shirt day and Wednesday's silly T-shirt day. Thursday could be pajama day, rounded off with Friday's school colors day.    4    Students decorate the walls, halls and classrooms with banners, posters and other adornments. Spirit Week posters and banners can reflect the theme of the week, the pride in the school, or show any other creative support of the school.

Parents love this special week as much as students and teachers do because parents have a great interest in the success of their children.    5    

【推荐3】Let’s face it: homework can be almost as frustrating for parents as it is for kids. Getting kids to do their homework can be a challenge, and when they do sit down to study, a variety of other problems can appear.

Doing homework may not be as fun as playing video games or chatting with friends, but it shouldn’t be something that kids hate. Your children’s assignments should not be busywork, but should help them build a skill or learn something new.

You can offer help by stepping in to answer questions or offer encouragement. This gives you a chance to see what they are learning and how well they understand the material. It helps you understand their learning style and shows you care about their education.

Many kids refuse to study by asking why they have to learn things they’ll never use in real life. If your son or daughter shows little interest in their assignments, you can make them seem more important by pointing out ways you use them in daily life.

Parents who feel that their kids have too much homework can talk about it with the teachers, but they’re in the minority. A 2007 survey showed that 15 percent of parents said their kids had too much homework. About 60 percent said the homework load was just right, and 25 percent thought their children had too little homework.

If you think it takes your child too long to finish homework, try to determine whether the problem lies in having too much work or managing time poorly. One of the things homework is supposed to do is to teach time management.

If your child feels bored while doing homework, consider the following suggestions to make study sessions more enjoyable.

Get help from friends: if your children are struggling with an assignment, let them call a friend for help or invite a friend over to work on it with them. You might also invite neighborhood kids over and let them do homework together. Have them sit around the dining table and help each other.

Add physical activities: set mini-goals for homework and allow time for stretching, jumping around, or a snack after each goal is completed. For a kid who can’t sit still, find active ways to study.

Turn the tables: let your children teach you a lesson. Let them give you a quiz on the things they have just learned.

【推荐2】Dolphins, African gray parrots and some other animals understand the idea of “zero,” but researchers were surprised to find that honeybees also comprehend this abstract concept, considering the insects’ tiny brains, according to a new study. Honeybees have fewer than one million neurons (神经元), compared with the 86 billion neurons in humans—and yet, they grasp a concept that humans, by some measures, don’t start to understand before preschool.

The researchers set up two cards, each of which had a set of symbols on them, like triangles or circles. Then, they trained a group of the bees to fly to the card with the lower number of symbols. The bees quickly learned what the humans wanted them to do to get their delicious, sweet rewards. The trained bees were then shown a card that was empty and one that had symbols on it. There is no need for the bees to be trained to fly more often to the empty card—thus showing that they understood that “zero” was a number less than the others.

Although they flew more often to an empty card than to one that had one symbol on it, it became easier for them to distinguish when the symbols on the card increased in number. For example, they more often flew to the zero when the other card had four symbols than when it had one.

Perhaps these findings will explain the brain mechanism (机制) behind what allows us to understand the concept of “nothing,” Adrian Dyer, a researcher said. This understanding, in turn, could help in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) that also understands this concept. “If bees can understand ‘zero’ with a brain of less than a million neurons, it suggests there are simple, efficient ways to teach AI new tricks,” Dyer said in the statement.

【推荐1】Marine life (海洋生物) in Florida Keys is negatively influenced by two forces: human activity and climate change. The former involves fishing, tourism and diving while the latter causes a large increase in intense hurricanes. Fortunately, when the researchers of Florida Museum of Natural History started looking for sea urchins (海胆) on the ocean floor off the coast of Florida Keys in the summer of 2020, they uncovered their population had relatively been stable since the 1960s.

The researchers visited 27 sites along a 20-mile stretch of coast near Florida Keys looking for tracks that reflected the presence of burrowing echinoids (穴居海胆类动物).“The findings that burrowing echinoids have been highly resilient (有适应力的) against climate change and environmental pollution over the last 60 years was a huge discovery for us.” said study co-author Tobias Grun.

Grun said, “However, we know little about their current distribution, population size, and health. The reason is not the lack of interest by the scientific community but lies in that fieldwork is very expensive.” As the climate crisis progresses, it’s important to understand why some marine creatures are more resilient in bearing the impacts of a worsening environment than others. Grun said, “Evolution may be at play. Some marine animals are very opportunistic. They can tolerate a wide range of abiotic factors like pH, temperature, and salinity, to name a few.”

Grun added, “At this point, our data show that burrowing echinoids are more resilient than many other marine species and are doing comparatively well. That does not mean that we can push our luck and keep going the way we are right now. Our study provides some hope that these creatures are resilient, but much more work is needed to translate our findings into a larger scale. The reasons for their resilience are also widely unknown.”

【推荐2】Since 1992, people have been talking about “Dunbar’s number,” the supposed upper limit of the number of people with whom a person can maintain stable social relationships. Named for British scientist Robin Dunbar, its value, rounded from 148 to 150, has permeated both professional and popular culture.

The Swedish taxation authority keeps offices under 150 people as a result of it, and the standard facilities of the W. L. Gore and Associates company are based around the concept. Dunbar’s number was cited in the bestselling book Tipping Point, and it also has a fair amount of academic influence.

Despite its fame, Dunbar’s number is probably wrong, according to a new study.

Less well known than the value of Dunbar’s number is how he came up with it. The value of 150 is determined by looking at the ratio(比率) between the size of a certain part of the primate(灵长类动物) brain and the average size of groups they form. These ratios were then applied to data on the human brain, and the average value of roughly 150 relationships was determined.

In the new study, the researchers did similar calculations but with updated information on the size of monkey brains and social networks. When the researchers applied Dunbar’s exact same methods to their new data, they got a 95% confidence interval(置信区间) between roughly 5 and 292 people. This is far too wide a range to be of any use.

Additionally, the researchers noted the fact that human brains often work differently than those of our nearest cousins, as evidenced by our ability to create things. The idea that we would process social information exactly like other primates do is a bold and largely unsupported claim.

So, is there a new Dunbar number? Well, this isn’t the point of this study. The researchers end their paper with: “It is our hope that this study will put an end to the use of ‘Dunbar’s number’ within science and in popular media.”