When 7-year-old Ella was in hospital last year, she turned to one of her favorite activities for comfortable coloring. Now she’s collecting crayons to make sure young patients across the country can share the joy. Ella says, “I like that everyone can come up with something in imagination and draw it on a piece of paper.”

When she was in Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital, she asked her mother to go to the hospital playroom in search of crayons. She was told that the hospital could not provide the crayons because of cross contamination (交叉污染).

Knowing that Ella had the dream of sharing the joy of coloring with other young patients, Ella’s mother got a new idea. She started soliciting donations (募捐) through word of mouth and social media. With the help of her mom, Ella began her project Color Me A Rainbow. In a year, she collected 13,132 boxes of crayons and 254 coloring books donated from across the country. Ella has become known as “The Crayon Kid”.

“Neighbors and friends drove a half-hour to bring 10 boxes of crayons because they just wanted to be a part of it,” says Ella’s mom, whose storehouse (仓库) is filled with crayons and books. Ella writes a personal note to each recipient (接受的) hospital as well as to donators. And now hospitalized kids who received crayons and their parents are paying it forward by donating new boxes of crayons back to Ella’s project.

The little girl has big dreams. She wants to donate 1,000 crayon boxes to every children’s hospital in the USA and plans to send 5,000 boxes to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. And after she has reached every children’s hospital in the country, Ella says, “I want to help as many people as I can.”

Willpower helps us to keep studying and working hard. It allows us to say no to the extra sweet after a meal. We may not achieve our goals if we fail to control ourselves, so scientists have been studying willpower for many years.

One of the main theories (理论) of willpower is the energy model of self-control. According to it, the brain can provide limited power, which can be used up. Nobody is disciplined all the time. When an act of self-control weakens our will, we’ll feel tired because of the decrease of blood sugar as we face another challenge.

This model has great influence, but Northwestern University’s Daniel Molden doesn’t agree with it. His team has been using a new experiment to test the role of carbohydrate metabolism (碳水化合物代谢) in self-control.

Daniel’s team questioned the finding that self-control lowers blood sugar levels. Volunteers ate nothing and had their baseline blood sugar level tested. Some completed high self-control tasks, while others did low disciplined tasks. Later, all volunteers had blood sugar tests and did another self-control challenge.

The results were interesting. Volunteers who completed the challenging task showed less willpower in the following task. This agrees with the energy model. However, their blood sugar did not fall. It showed that willpower didn’t increase carbohydrate metabolism.

The energy model suggests that using up sugar can bring back self-control. Daniel’s team tested this idea by having volunteers rinse (清洗) their mouths with water mixed with sugar, spitting (吐出) it out like mouthwash. Others rinsed with the artificial sweetened water that was similar to a sugary drink but provided no energy. Later, all volunteers participated in a second task requiring self-control.

The results disagreed with the energy model once again. Those who rinsed with the artificial sweetened water showed lower willpower. However, rinsing with the sugary water seemed to bring back volunteers’ lost willpower, more than the artificially sweetened water. This study showed that only the sugary rinse could bring back self-control.

Scientists believe that inspiration is the reason why self-control is back. They believe the mouth “senses” the carbohydrates in the mouthwash, which may tell that a reward (奖励) is coming. Sensing that an energy increase is coming, the brain is active to put in extra effort. In short, the sugar inspires—rather than offers energy for—willpower.

If inspiration can be refilled with something as simple as a mouthwash, this opens different possibilities for new researches in the future.

If traditional Chinese culture were a gold mine (金矿), then Zhong Yetang would be the miner.

Zhong is now a full-time vlogger with almost 200,000 followers on a social platform. Zhong has a special style as she tries to bring ancient history back to life in a creative way. She is finding a relationship between traditional culture and modern design.

“I don’t want people to see some Chinese ancient culture as boring and far-off,” she said, “we have duty to make the past serve the present and it can be cool and fashionable and something we can play with.” She recreates dishes from ancient books, makes short plays that tell ancient people’s life stories and compares Chinese customs with similar Western ones. For example, she played two roles as the ancient beauties Xishi and Yang Yuhuan, making them compete in a rap battle with each other.

In another video, Zhong wears costumes (服装) from the 56 ethnic (民族的) groups of China. Half of them were bought, and the other half were self-designed. It took her almost two years to prepare for it.

“I didn’t expect that it would take so long and that I’d face so many challenges,” she said. To make the clothing true to the ethnic groups, Zhong studied a lot of reading material and got information from local people. But she found that some culture had been lost.

“I’m impressed most by the Hezhe ethnic group. Their clothes were made from fish skin,” Zhong said. “But due to its lack of practical value, fish skin was gradually replaced by silk and cloth. As a result, fewer people now know how to make it.” She tried hard to restore one of these costumes as authentically (真正地) as possible. After studying in the US for three years, she found that many Americans were curious about Chinese culture. That inspired her to devote herself to becoming a “gold miner of traditional Chinese culture” after she graduated. She is making her videos available on various popular video platforms.

39. 每个人都在变化中成长。在三年的初中生活中，你一定经历了很多改变。假如你是李华，你校英语社团公众号计划做主题为“My Change for Growth”的系列推送。请你写一篇英文稿件投稿，谈谈谁或什么事让你在改变中成长，你的感悟是什么。