2 . One of my fellow volunteers, a girl from Tanzania, seemed a bit sad, so I asked what the problem was. She told me she had a friend back home, who was, really________with her university studies. It was beginning to look like financial difficulties, which would make it________for her to complete her course.

So this friend of mine had done something________: she had sent all her pocket money for the month to Tanzania to________her friend! This meant that she didn’t have much food to eat, no money to go________outside the village, no money to buy any clothes, and so on.

I was so________that she did this for her friend and I felt I had to do something. So,________ my next trip to one of the nearby towns I walked into the fair trade shop to buy some food. I didn’t have much money________myself but I thought I’d buy her an extra box of the muesli we both liked and some rice. I started talking to the woman________in the shop, who was also a volunteer and________told her about my friend.

The woman looked at me,________ “Does she eat pasta? she asked. “Yes,” I replied. She immediately started________a bag with pasta, cookies, more muesli, sweets and other things until the bag was full. “Give her this for me. It’ s my________!” I couldn’t believe it but cried with________.

I left the shop to go home with my________bag of food, I asked the woman her name. “Just Gloria! God________both of you!” she said.

Imagine my friend’s face when I________the gifts on my kitchen table. I have never seen her so happy! A few weeks later, she found Gloria in the shop and thanked her________. These two________women really showed me what true kindness and compassion is, and the________will stay with me for the rest of my life!

3 . Erin Alexander was having a hard day. A waitress working at Starbucks was too. Erin ordered an iced green tea and told the waitress to cheer up. After picking up the order, she noticed a message on the cup: “Erin, your soul is golden.” Erin Alexander recalled the incident, “Of course, I was still really sad, but that little thing made the rest of my day.”

New findings, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in August, prove just how powerful experiences like Erin’s can be. Researchers found that people who perform a random act of kindness tend to underestimate how much the recipient will appreciate it. And they believe that miscalculation could hold many of us back from doing nice things for others more often.

A recent experiment recruited 84 participants at an ice skating rink in Chicago, where they were given a hot chocolate and asked to keep it or give it to a stranger as an act of kindness. The 75 participants who gave away their hot chocolate were asked to predict how the recipient would feel on a scale from 0 (very small) to 10 (very large), and the recipients were then asked to report their actual feelings on the same scales.

In that experiment, the people doing the kind thing consistently underestimated the appreciation they received, according to Amit Kumar, a psychology professor at the University of Texas. “People tend to think that what they are giving is kind of little, maybe it’s relatively inconsequential,” Dr. Kumar said. “But recipients are less likely to think along those lines. They consider the gesture to be significantly more meaningful because they are also thinking about the fact that someone did something nice for them.” Dr. Kumar continued, “With an experiment like this, I hope it will inspire more people to actually commit random acts of kindness.”

6 . We smile because we are happy, and we frown because we are sad. Recent studies suggest that our emotions are driven by their related facial expressions.

This February psychologists at the University of Cardiff in Wales found that people whose ability to frown is lessened by botox injections (肉毒杆菌注射) are happier, on average, than people who can frown. The researchers administered an anxiety and depression questionnaire to 25 females, half of whom had received botox injections to stop frowning. The botox injected people reported feeling happier and less anxious in general.

In a related study from March, scientists at the Technical University of Munich found that the botox subjects had much lower activity in the brain circuits (回路) involved in emotional processing and responses — in the amygdala, hypothalamus and other parts of the brain — as compared with controls who had not received treatment.

The concept works the opposite way, too. People who frown during an unpleasant procedure report feeling more pain than those who do not, according to a study published in May 2008 in the Journal of Pain. Researchers applied heat to the forearms of 29 participants, who were asked to either make unhappy, neutral or relaxed faces during the procedure. Those who exhibited negative expressions reported being in more pain than the other two groups.

No one yet knows why our facial expressions influence our emotions as they seem to. The associations in our mind between how we feel and how we react may be so strong that our expressions simply end up strengthen our emotions — there may be no evolutionary reason for the connection.

8 . Robots in the art world are nothing new. In fact, for centuries, people have built robots as art objects. However, what’s different now is that artists and engineers are building robots that actually create art.

In 1973, British-born painter Harold Cohen wrote a computer program and called it AARON. At first, AARON only made simple outlines whose color and details Cohen would later add. Fifty years later, AARON is able to paint anything a human could paint. So can AARON be called an artist or creative? In 2010, Cohen explained, “Although he wrote the initial computer code that AARON follows, AARON can generate unlimited numbers of images.” So according to Cohen, the simple answer is yes-AARON is creative.

It’s not just paintings that robots are creating, though. Last year, a robot called Shimon released is first album (唱片) on Spotify. Shimon began life as a simple robot marimba (木琴) player. Over the years, however, it’s learned how to perform with other musicians, write original songs. Shimon does this by analyzing huge amounts of music—roughly 50,000 rock, jazz and hip-hop songs-to identify patterns and then uses that information to create original works.

It may be cool to hear a song created by a robot, but is there any other reason to build robots that can play music? According to Gil Weinberg, one of Shimon’s creators, because the robot is capable of doing things that a real musician might not think of, he and his team “hope and believe that these new abilities would lead to new directions that could not be achieved in human-to-human cooperation.”

While questions about robots creating art are fun to think about, there are many other ways that robots can help artists in the way they create their works. For example, advancements in 3D-printing technology will allow artists to build more complex pieces for their sculptures. Therefore, robots in the art world are here to stay.

9 . When people think of a typical mineral mine, it’s probably underground. It’s unlikely that the picture of plants and soft greenery would cross their minds. Now, new explorations into phytomining (植物采矿) may change that viewpoint. Instead of traditionally mining metals from rocks, phytomining uses plants as an alternative source for them. Using plants to extract metals can have significant environmental benefits over rock mining.

Phytomining was first studied in 1983, but it hasn’t yet been adopted by the metals industry. In 2004, Indonesian soil scientist Tjoa took her research to Sorowako, a small town in Indonesia with one of the largest nickel (镍) mining areas, to look into plants that continued to live after years of mining. She brought samples back to her lab and found that these super plants were more than just surviving — they were growing.

The plants were absorbing and storing nickel from the soil. Large amounts of metals kill most plants, but these, known as hyper-accumulators (超富集植物), were learning to adapt. If these plants were storing metal, that meant science could find a way to extract the minerals for use and quite frankly, scientists easily did. When the shoots are harvested and burned, the metals are separated from the plant material in the ashes.

Tjoa returned to Sorowako and spent years searching for new hyper-accumulator species. After a plant is considered a possibility, there’s a simple test paper that turns pink when placed against the leaf of a hyper-accumulator plant. Two local Indonesian plants were found but there are many others still to be discovered.

Tjoa’s research caught the attention of Bijasksana, a professor of rock magnetism. Together they designed an experiment to understand magnetic susceptibility (磁化率) when plants accumulate more nickel. Their research led to the discovery of two new species of hyper-accumulators. Besides, this research serves as the basis for the potential that plants can give to the mining industry, offering great advantages to our ecosystem and toward building a more sustainable future.

10 . A world in which extinct creatures could be brought back to life came a step closer yesterday. Australian scientists have managed to extract a gene from a preserved sample of a Tasmanian tiger and make it active. The breakthrough has left them dreaming that one day they will be able to recreate the animal, which died out more than 70 years ago. And if it can be done with the Tasmanian tiger, it may also be possible to resurrect(复活) creatures that have been extinct for far longer.

“There used to be a time when extinction meant forever, but no more,” said Professor Mike Archer. “We are now able to seriously challenge whether those animals that have gone have gone for ever. What has been achieved is a very important step in bringing back those animals that are extinct. And while I think that technically it is still pretty difficult at the moment, we can now see the possibilities. I’m personally convinced that the Tasmanian tiger will be brought back to life in my lifetime.”

The breakthrough came after nine years of experiments by scientists at the University of Melbourne, who extracted a gene from one of several tigers preserved in alcohol in a Melbourne museum. They removed the equivalent gene from a mouse embryo (胚胎), implanted the tiger gene and then watched as the mouse continued to grow normally, suggesting the tiger gene had been activated.

Team leader Dr. Andrew Pask said it was the first time DNA from an extinct species had been used to” induce (引起) a functional response in another living organism”.

However, the animal’s entire gene structure would have to be revived in the same way to even begin the possibility of bringing the Tasmanian tiger back from the dead. Mick Mooney, a wildlife officer of the Tasmanian Government, was worried that such developments could encourage people’s indifference to the protection of endangered species.

“If people think that we can bring animals back to life after they’ve gone, they will start saying that there is nothing to worry about because we can fix it up later.”