Your brain doesn’t have to do anything extra (额外的) to tell the truth. You think of what you want to say, and you say it. Lying ________ much more work.

Here’s an ________ of what goes into a simple lie. Imagine you’re late for class and the teacher asks ________ and you decide to lie. You now have to either came up with a story or remember the story you ________ as you were rushing to class. So you say, “I had to stop by the ________ and borrowed a book.” Your teacher asks, “The book I recommended (推荐) last period?”

You must decide how to answer ________. If you say yes, the teacher might ask you to show her the book. Or she might ________ you to read from it in class. If you say it is a ________ book, she might ask which book you’ve checked out. So you have to be ready with the ________ of another book and make sure it’s a book the school library owns.

You give your ________ a ton of extra work! Why not just tell the truth? It’s much easier.

Have you ever seen lions dancing in the streets? The lions dance to the beat of a drum (鼓). Of course, they are not real lions. They are dancers in lion costurnes (服饰). Lion dancing first started in China centuries ago. It is meant to bring good luck in the coming year.

Usually, a lion is made up of two dancers. One dancer controls the head. The other controls the tail.

“I think of it as a sport,” says Anthony Huang, aged 16. He is a member of the New York Chinese Freemasons Athletic Club. Anthony performs (表演) as the lion’s head. It can weigh 20 pounds. Lion dancing is important to Anthony. “This tradition really lifts me up,” he says.

In the past, lion dancing was performed mostly by men. But it is different today. LionDanceMe is a lion dancing group in San Francisco, California. There are boys and girls on its team. They dance together.

“Anyone can take up lion dancing. You have to believe that you can do it,” says Ananda Tang-Lee, a 17-year-old girl.

Lion dancing will continue to evolve. But a team’s sense of community will never change. “We call it a family,” Ananda says, “It’s really great, because we always have each other’s backs.”

The Search-for-Lost-Birds list has come to public attention recently. It lists ten kinds of birds that have not been seen in the wild for at least fifteen years. The list is calling on people to search for the rarest (最珍稀的) birds on Earth.

There could be several reasons for the long disappearances of the birds on the list. Maybe there have been no studies in areas where they live. Maybe people don’t know where or how to find them. Maybe there are changes to their natural homes because of human activities.

This year, four expeditions (考察队) are planning to find eight kinds of birds. If any of these lost birds are found, ways can be found to protect them and help their populations grow. This has happened with birds like the Madagascar pochard. The number of this once-lost kind of bird is now increasing.

A team of scientists are carrying out a project at the University of Greenwich in London. They are trying to find ways to make food on Mars (火星) in the future. The project is called Feeding Mars. It tries to use water, fish and fish waste to grow fruit and vegetables on Mars.

It would take at least 21 months to reach Mars, learn about its surface and return to Earth. So it would be a big help if the spacemen could grow fresh food on Mars itself.

Farming on Mars, however, will be very hard. There’s plenty of water that could be taken from ice just below the surface, but the land on Mars is missing the nutrients (养分) that living things need. The team say that they could solve the problem by growing plants and fish together. Fish waste can then be used to provide nutrients for plants.

“It is expected that you can grow lots of food, such as vegetables, salads, teas and medicinal plants on Mars,” said Dr Benz Kotzen, who leads the project. “You can even harvest (捕获) fish for food then.”

The night sky is our earliest library. There, we stored our knowledge, and passed it down around the fire, before we invented the written word.

I remember going to the local university for an astronomy (天文学) night when I was a child. That night, I saw Saturn, one of the planets, and its rings with my own eyes for the first time. The rings shone bright against the blackness of space and suddenly the universe (宇宙) wasn’t something that you only read about or imagined in your head. It was right there, and you were a part of it. That moment is priceless.

While starlight is good, light pollution here on Earth can be a real problem. For the past 200 years or so, we have used too much electricity (电) to make the night brighter. However, brighter doesn’t usually mean better, especially when a lot of that light shines up into the sky where no one needs it.

Luckily, some cities have taken actions, like setting up new downward-directing lights along the streets. I hope that more cities will join in and continue the practice of controlling unnecessary lighting, so that more of us can watch the night sky in a way humans have for thousands of years.