1 . Fortunately or otherwise, moats(护城河)have been part of my neighborhood throughout my more than 60-year life. No matter where we moved, our house was never more than 300 meters away from the moat that is not far enough to avoid the overpowering unpleasant gas that wafted night and day from the putrid water of the moat where untreated sewage had been dumped for centuries. Later, I shifted to the capital. My house was just 50 meters away from a moat and its stench was no different than that from the one in Xi’an.

A few years after I shifted to the capital, the Xi’an authorities began cleaning the moat. Thousands of residents who were forced to stand the stench volunteered to help with the cleaning and after years of efforts, they turned the moat into a tourist attraction along with the famous city wall. It took a few more years for the Beijing authorities to start cleaning the moat near my house. It was dredged and its bed paved. More sewage plants were installed to treat the polluted water which was then re-released into the moat. And restaurants and factories along the moat were shifted elsewhere to prevent untreated water or waste from being discharged into it. Now the moat is perhaps the most attractive part of the Yuan Capital Relics Park. The 10-kilometer-long moat is my favorite place for evening walk. The cleaning of the moats in Xi’an and Beijing exemplify the efforts China has made to clean rivers, lakes, canals and moats.

While the government’s determination, huge investment and strict supervision are responsible for the improvement in water quality, China’s unique “river chief mechanism” has also played an important role in the success. The mechanism, introduced in 2007, assigns the upkeep and health of each part of a river to the top official of that area. Along the moat near my home in Beijing. there are many billboards with the phone numbers of local authorities who are also the river chiefs of different sections of the moat, asking residents to report any activities that could pollute the moat. I have no idea how many river chiefs there are in China, but I know there are at least five for the 10-km-long moat.

But for all the progress it has made in environmental and ecological protection, China still has a long way to go to improve water quality to the highest level, because despite more than 90 percent of the waste water being treated in urban areas, sewage treatment is not yet effective in rural areas.

2 . Growing up in Taiwan as the daughter of a calligrapher（书法家），one of my most treasured memories was my mother showing me the beauty, the shape and the form of Chinese characters. Ever since then, I was attracted by this amazing language.

But to an outsider, it seems to be as impenetrable as the Great Wall of China. Over the past few years, I've been wondering whether I can break down this wall, so that anyone who wants to understand and appreciate the beauty of this complex language could do so. I started thinking about how a new, fast method of learning Chinese might be useful.

At the age of five, 1 started to learn how to draw every single stroke（笔划）for each character in the correct order. I learned new characters every day during the next fifteen years. You only need 1 ,000 to understand the basic communication. The top 200 will allow you to read 40 percent of basic literature-enough   to read road signs, restaurant menus, to understand the basic idea of the web pages or the newspapers. Today I'm going to start with 8 characters to show you how the method works.

Open your mouth as wide as possible until it's square. You get a mouth---口. This is a person going for a walk with two legs. Person---人.The shape of the fire is a person with two arms on both sides, as if she was yelling crazily, ^u Help! I'm on fire!" ---火. This is a tree---木.This is a mountain--山.The sun---日. The moon---月.The symbol of the door looks like a pair of car doors---门.These eight characters are the building blocks for you to create lots more characters.

4 . The spot of red was what first caught Randy Heiss's attention on December 16. He was biking on his ranch in Patagonia, Arizona, a town near the U. S. -Mexico border. Heiss walked toward it, and found on the grassland was a broken balloon with its string attached to a piece of paper.

“Dayami,” it read on one side, in a child's writing. It was a Christmas wish list, all in Spanish He suspected that a child had tried to send Santa Claus a Christmas wish list by balloon, something he used to do himself when he was a kid. And he wondered whether he could find the child who had sent this one.

It would be difficult, but based on the prevailing wind, Heiss was pretty sure where it came from—just across the border, the city of Nogales, Mexico.

Heiss then posted about his quest on Facebook, attaching photos, hoping his friends in Nogales might know the girl's family.

A few days passed with no leads. Heiss worried that time was running out before Chirstmas. On December 19. he sent a private Facebook message to Radio XENY. a radio station based in Nogales The next morning. Heiss awoke to a message from Radio XENY: They had located Dayami, an eight-year-old girl, and her family, who indeed lived in Nogales. “It just changed my entire day.” said Heiss. Having bought just about everything on Dayami's list and a few other toys, as they had learned that Dayami had a younger sister, Heiss and his wife. at the Radio XENY. met the family.

“Their eves were wide open with wonder.” Heiss said of the two sisters' reactions. “Like. ‘Oh my gosh, this really did work!’”

Not wanting to disappoint the girls who still believed in Santa Claus, Heiss and his wife told them they were “Santa's helpers”.

“It was a beautiful and healing experience for us...” Heiss said, “Since our only son died ten years ago, being around children at Christmas time has been absent in our lives.” Heiss said. “We now have friends for life. And, for a day, that border fence with its wire melted away.”

5 . Americans are now allowed to get a COVID-19 vaccine （疫苗）. But the process in America is not going as smoothly as some had hoped. Many people are still facing a wait for their first shot. Moreover, the vaccines aren't available to kids under 16 yet. That's because scientists have only tested if the vaccine works in adults.

The good news is that there are two companies, Moderna and Pfizer, making COVID-19 vaccines. They are now running clinical trials（临床实验）to test their vaccines in teens and kids. Volunteers are given a treatment plan and then evaluated after.

Clinical trials are designed with safety in mind and usually done in adults first. They work like this: volunteers get placed into one of two groups. One group receives the vaccine. The other group gets a placebo. This is a shot given in the same way as the vaccine but with no effect. Scientists can compare the effects of the real vaccine against the placebo to see if the vaccine works. Researchers want to know everything that a person experiences when they get the shot, so they can detect any harmful effects. If anything did happen, the trial would stop immediately.

Some teens are eager to volunteer because they want to help people. Maybe you're the right age to be part of a clinical trial for the COVID-19 vaccine. Why not volunteer For A Vaccine Trial? Interested kids should read about the trials because every trial has risks. They should talk to their doctor and weigh the benefits and risks. Every vaccine has rare side effects in a few patients.

If you want to participate in a trial, you can try to sign up online by just clicking here, clinicaltrials gov. which lists every clinical trial in the US, including COVID-19 vaccine trials.

6 . The first known dress, as well as the earliest known bar and restaurant in France, were identified this week. The discoveries, reported in the journal Antiquity, provide a glimpse of what early life was like in both ancient Egypt and southern France thousands of years ago.

The garment, which dates to around 3482 BC, is known as the Tarkhan Dress, and now looks like a shabby and dirty shirt. When new, however, the linen dress would have looked fashionable even today, as researchers determined it featured a natural pale gray stripe with pleated sleeves and bodice. Its edge is missing, so the original length of the dress is unknown.

"The survival of highly perishable textiles（纺织品）in the archaeological record is exceptional（例外的）, the survival of complete, or almost complete, articles of clothing like the Tarkhan Dress is even more remarkable," Alice Stevenson, head of the University College London（UCL）Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, said in a press release.

Now that the dress' age has been confirmed, it has been named Egypt's oldest garment and is the oldest known surviving woven garment in the world. To calculate its age. Michael Dee of the University of Oxford and colleagues measured a small Sample of the dress to determine how much radiocarbon remained in the linen. Linen is especially   suitable for radiocarbon dating, according to the researchers, because it is made of flax fibers that grow over a relatively short time. The dress, currently on display at the UCI.

Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, features wear and tear that date back to its earliest days. The researchers believe that a young teenager or a very slim woman wore it.

A separate study in the same journal reports the discovery of a hotel in southern France. At first the researcher thought that they had found a bakery, since they determined that the site once featured three huge ovens. They later, however, found that another nearby room across from a courtyard, had furniture lining its walls.

8 . When Chef Enrique Olvera opened his restaurant, Pujol, 13 years ago, his only goal was to have the best restaurant in the neighborhood. Olvera's budget was so small that he had to do all the things himself. But Pujol is now widely thought of as Mexico's finest restaurant and the 36th best in the world. He reached his position by making his cuisine 'fancier and fancier, and more complex' over time. Pujol now serves a tasting menu of sophisticated food that wouldn't look out of place even at New York's Momofuku Ko. To decode his rocket soar in world cuisine circus, Olvera insists on mixing elaborate, cutting-edge techniques with a strong emphasis on local ingredients to create a cosmopolitan cuisine that's at once international yet unmistakably Mexican, matching the direction of Mexico City itself.

A visit to the 48-seat Pujol reveals a space-age kitchen containing 27 cooks, with one making his fifth attempt to reshape the egg liquid and another coloring potatoes. Pujol tolerates any grotesque attempt a chef could imagine and the restaurant is the trial site for its staff. That makes Pujol a hot place to attract free labor. The chef has also thought more about bringing Mexican cooks home from the U.S. Many are returning to move past the glass ceiling that exists in America. “Despite the number of Mexicans working in U.S. restaurants, you rarely see a Mexican head chef in a New York kitchen,” said Olvera. “Then why not come back here to attract diners here for the most local but also novel dishes?”

And for foreign diners, Mexican restaurants have another wonder to offer. Just think that merely 30 dollars can sustain you for a 4-course feast in an ordinary Mexican restaurant and no one could resist the temptation. To achieve such high cost performance, Olvera states that you have to keep looking for and exploring with the simple ingredients from which to accomplish amazing dishes. “You always cherish where you come from, but there’s also the need for new sensations. Keep exploring with new ideas until you get a better dish.” After all, it’s the soul of modern cuisine.