2 . Louie, a pet parrot, saved a whole family. He ______ the sleeping Klein family in the middle of the night as flames swept through their home.

“Louie is a true ______,” Barbara Klein recently told news agency South West News Service(SWNS). “If it hadn’t been for him, I probably wouldn’t have been ______ at that time. He started shouting ‘Fire’. He had never said that word before in my ______. When I woke up, the fire was starting to spread across the living room floor.” Unluckily for the family, Louie didn’t ______. Barbara said, “He was like our babies, so it’s ______.”

Barbara took her five-year-old granddaughter ______ and ran out of the house. Her husband Larry also made it out, but was severely wounded when escaping from the burning building. “He ran to the kitchen and tried to ______ the fire out with water,” Barbara told SWNS. “After we left, he ran back into the house and insisted on ______ the pet but with no ______.” The Kleins suffered great ______ in the fire. Their house was in ______ along with its contents and the parrot Louie passed away.

“People have ______ with clothing and someone donated an apartment for three months,” Barbara said. “The man who donated the apartment also ______ us with a baby parrot. We call him Louie Jr to _____   Louie.”

4 . Arsh believes in the importance of making the world a more beautiful place. The talented boy not only paints but also sells his artwork and donates the money.

It all started when his parents bought him a set of painting tools for his 8th birthday. Once he had his own materials, he began spending much of his free time putting color on his canvas. As Arsh’s paintings began to grow in number, he decided to give them as gifts to friends and family. Receiving a positive response from people around him, he soon realized his pieces had the potential to get much more than smiles and praise.

His light-bulb moment came shortly after: he would sell his artwork and donate the money to charity. His first plan was to raise $1,000 for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, which he accomplished in around nine months by selling his paintings on social media and at local art shows. Since then, he’s broadened his reach to benefit other organizations, including childhood cancer nonprofit Compass to Care and the Make-A-Wish Foundation. He’s raised over $16,000 for charities so far.

Arsh’s artwork is often colorful and cheery, as one might expect from a youngster, but it showcases the impressive technique of a gifted artist. Some pieces are more abstract in nature; others feature realistic renditions (演绎) of flowers and animals. They range in size and complexity, and, accordingly, price. Small paintings might sell for $10 while larger canvases, up to five feet, have gone for $800.

Last year, Arsh won The Diana Award, an honor presented by a UK charity founded on Princess Diana’s belief that young people have the power to change their country. And the young artist has advice for other kids looking to make a difference. “Helping others doesn’t have to be, like, money or anything. It can be your time, your skills, your talent,” he says, “and overall, just be kind to other people to make their day better.”

6 . While work on lab-grown meat has made the headlines in recent years, similar work on fruit is less common. Scientists at Plant & Food Research in New Zealand are aiming to change that by growing fruit tissue (组织) from plant cells (细胞) that they hope will one day taste, smell and feel like real fruit. Researchers hope that the program will help guarantee the country’s food security.

“Here in New Zealand, we’re good at growing traditional horticultural crops (园艺作物),”said Dr. Ben Schon, the lead scientist for the Food by Design program at the government-backed Plant & Food Research, “but looking into the future, there’s a lot of change coming in the world with population growth, increasing urbanisation (城镇化) and climate change.”

The program aims to grow fruit tissue without the parts that are usually discarded like the peel of the banana. Providing consumers with only the tissue of fruit will help reduce food waste, said Schon.

Lab-grown foods could play an important role in sustainable (可持续的) agriculture but are still in the very early stages of development, according to Dr. Ali Rashidinejad, a senior food scientist at Massey University in Palmerston North. Since lab-grown food is a completely new idea, once it is developed, it will then have to prove its safety through long expensive experiments. The Plant & Food Research program started 18 months ago, but scientists warn that the end goal of getting something that is nutritional and enjoyable to eat is some years away and might not be achievable at all.

The technology would probably be suitable for growing fruit tissue within cities, said Dr. Sam Baldwin, a strategy leader at Plant & Food Research, in the hope that it would reduce the cost and carbon emissions created when transporting food into urban centres.

7 . I love reading. My taste in books is fairly wide ranging with few exceptions, one of them being mysteries. So, I was quite surprised to find myself lost in Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache novels, all 18 of them.

After I received a cancer diagnosis (诊断) in December of 2022, Peter, one of my closest friends, told me to read Penny’s books. I took his advice. The characters in the novels took hold of my mind and transported me away from the fear during the treatments.

Suffering side effects from my treatments, my world became quite small. With my limited energy, I read one book after another, repeating Inspector Gamache’s words, “All will be well.” I whispered these words to myself before every medical treatment.

On one especially uncomfortable night, lying on the bed with my book, I was suddenly transported not to Inspector Gamache’s world, but to the bedroom of my childhood with a different book in hand, The Hidden Staircase, a Nancy Drew mystery. When my parents’ marriage was falling apart at that time, I always sought comfort from Nancy. Returning to my Inspector Gamache mystery that night, I realized that perhaps it was the memory of those lonely nights from my childhood that kept me from reading mysteries. I never wanted to feel fear like that again, and yet here I was afraid of what would become of my life if the cancer wasn’t cured. Now the fighting was within me. Could I really trust that all would be well?

Although there is nothing fair about a cancer diagnosis, my belief that problems can be solved has only gotten stronger. But most of all, I still believe in the power of the written words to help us through dark nights when sleep is slow to come. There is no mystery in that.

8 . In a recent heartwarming story, Mr. Sun has touched the hearts of many by using AI face-swapping technology to create a video message from his late father.

The touching video captures Sun’s emotions as he replicates his father’s appearance and voice to convey a message of well-being to his grandmother. The entire process of face-swapping and video creation took a lot of effort and lasted nearly half a month, during which Sun couldn’t help but shed tears as he missed his deceased father.

In 2022, Sun’s father was diagnosed with a rare condition known as appendiceal mucinous adenocarcinoma (阑尾黏液腺癌). Despite Sun’s efforts to seek medical treatment for his father, the disease progressed rapidly, and his father passed away in 2023.

Concerned about his grandmother’s fragile health, the family decided to keep Sun’s father’s passing a secret. They fabricated (编造) a story, telling the elderly woman that her son was still receiving treatment in a Beijing hospital. The prolonged separation depressed the grandmother a lot, who continuously expressed her longing to speak with her son.

In a creative attempt to comfort his grandmother, Sun, inspired by science fiction films, decided to use AI face-swapping technology to create a video message from his father. Prior to recording the video, he even shaved off his bear d to look more like his late father. By using AI software, he successfully transformed his appearance into that of his father, delivering a heartfelt message to his grandmother: “Mom, it’s Jihai. I’m doing well in Beijing.” Despite the relatively low pixel (像素) quality, the grandmother believed the well-intentioned fabrication.

Sun admitted that his emotions almost broke down within the half-month, as every mention of his father’s name or a glance of his photograph brought great sorrow. He also expressed uncertainty about how long he can keep up the fabrication and whether he will make use of face-swapping again. Nevertheless, he is determined to follow in his father’s footstep to be a strong support for his family.

9 . Putting down the book I was reading, I turned to my mum. “Next year, when I go to high school…,” I started, thinking of all the novels I’d soon finish. But before I could finish my sentence, Mum ________ my words. “There will be no high school,” she said. “We don’t have ________ for uniforms or school shoes or books.”

My family were very poor and the kids all ________ school, including me. Years later, I met George and got married. Life went on,________ the desire to study never left me. “When we retire, I want to go to university,” I told George. I wanted to ________ to myself that I could do it.

In 2015, we ________ and I seized my chance. At the age of 66, I was ________ to a program with the University of the Sunshine Coast which helped ________ students prepare for university.

Walking onto campus that first day in February 2017, it was clear I was the ________ student there. My biggest challenge wasn’t the course work; it was the ________.

Before ________ my first paper, I turned to two girls next to me. “How do I send this in?” I asked. They kindly showed me, but as I clicked “send” I was ________ all that work had disappeared into the black hole of cyberspace never to be seen again.

I loved campus life and ________ all my subjects. When I was invited to ________, I cried. I couldn’t believe I’d done it. My family all came to my graduation ceremony in April 2023 and sat in the front row.

If you’re thinking of getting a ________, just do it. I have three great grandchildren now and if I can get a degree aged 73, so can you.

10 . LEGO is to begin selling braille (盲文) bricks to help blind and partially sighted children learn to read the touch-based alphabet (全部字母).

After the first announcement of its braille bricks in 2019, LEGO has announced that shoppers would be able to buy the accessible kit for the first time. Up until now, the LEGO Foundation has given out the kits free of charge, as part of a pilot program, to organizations specializing in the education of children with vision impairment (障碍).

While some view braille as old-fashioned, given modern technology that can turn written text into spoken word, blind adults say they like to read with their fingers while listening to other things.

The European Blind Union says knowledge of braille leads to improved spelling, reading and writing, contributing to higher levels of education and better employment opportunities for those who are vision impaired.

Dave Williams, who works for the Royal National Institute of Blind People, which acts for blind and partially sighted people, said, “Who would want a greeting card read to you? And there are things like board games.” And he added learning braille with LEGO helped give those who could not read print independence.

Lisa Taylor, mum to seven-year-old Olivia, said, “Olivia first discovered LEGO braille bricks at school and they had such a big impact on her curiosity about braille. Before then, she found it hard to get started with the symbols but now she’s improving all the time.”