1 . On a warm morning last summer, California bus driver Tim Watson was about halfway through his daily express route from Milpitas to Fremont when an alert from the Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) flashed across his dashboard screen. A toddler had been kidnapped in Milpitas, the message read, and it asked that drivers be on the lookout for the boy.

The victim was described as a three-year-old child in plaid shorts and red shoes; the suspect, a man in his 20s wearing jeans and a black hooded sweatshirt. Tim felt his stomach drop when he realized that a man with a toddler in plaid shorts had boarded the bus just ten minutes earlier.

Before alerting authorities, he wanted to confirm their identities. Pulling into a parking lot, he announced that he needed to look for a lost bag. He moved slowly down the aisle, peering under each seat, until he approached the last row. “I saw the red shoes,” says Tim. “But I knew I had to keep cool.”

Back behind the wheel, Tim apologized for the delay and pulled the bus onto the highway. Not wanting to arouse suspicion, he waited a few minutes, then radioed the bus dispatcher, who directed him to continue to his final stop, where police officers would be waiting.

Minutes later, after making the last turn, he stopped the bus and opened the doors. As the man got off the bus with the boy, a police officer grabbed the child out of his arms, threw the suspect to the ground, and handcuffed him behind his back.

The police officers told Tim that the man, David Edington, 23, had snatched the boy from the Milpitas library after he wandered away from his mother. Tim thought about his own sons, ages 17 and 21. “I went back in the bus alone and broke down,” he says. Then he climbed out again to check that the boy was OK. Tim found him sitting calmly in the front seat of a squad car, without a tear in sight. “I just smiled at him,” Tim says. “I knew he was safe.”

Now, Tim is still humble about his actions. “I try to teach my kids to look out for people who can’t defend themselves,” he says. “And that’s what I did.”

2 . As HalleeMcCoombes approaches the finish line of the 800-metre run for kids with disability, the crowd is cheering wildly and chanting her name. The ten-year-old paralysed-athlete had spent months preparing for the ______ in Brisbane. Now she has the hyper-focused ______ that has become her trademark; anyone who has seen her ______ knows that nothing will stop her now. With only ten metres to go, Hallee ______ all the noise and pushes forward with every ounce of her ______. She doesn’t have any ______ in her waist or below her knees, but pain sears her thighs. When Hallee crosses the finish line and ______ an exhausted heap, her twin, Jada, scoops her up in her arms. “You came in third!” she whispers to Hallee.

Hallee McCoombes has matched up numerous Australian track-and-field ______ in events for athletes with her type of impairments and has set her ______ on the Paralympics. It’s an amazing ______ for someone who wasn’t even expected to walk. Hallee was born with spina bifida (脊柱裂), a neural-tube defect that ______ how the spine and spinal cord form in the womb.

Her mother, Christine McCoombes, 38, shudders when she ______ learning about Hallee’s diagnosis. “The doctors also told us they didn’t know what kind of brain function she would have because she had hydrocephalus,” she recalls. “Fluid in the brain is ______ with spina bifida. We really didn’t know how much she’d be able to ______ physically and mentally.”

It’s no wonder that, regardless of how many times Hallee’s parents watch their ______ daughter compete, their hearts burst with pride. “I cry everytime, especially when people start cheering for her,” admits her dad, Gavin, 51.

3 . Nearly one-third of American adolescents and adults are affected by anxiety, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. In fact, over the last decade, anxiety has surpassed depression as the most common reason college students seek counseling (咨询) services, the New York Times reported. Sixty-two percent of undergraduates in survey reported “unbearable anxiety,” a significant increase from 50 percent in 2011.

Anxiety, along with depression, cuts across all demographics (人口统计数据), including both privileged and disadvantaged teenagers. But privileged teens are among the most emotionally upset youth in America, Arizona State University psychology professor Suniya Luthar told the New York Times.

“These kids are incredibly anxious and perfectionistic,” Suniya Luthar said, “there’s always one more activity, one more A. P. class, one more thing to do in order to get into a top college. Kids have a sense that they’re not measuring up. The pressure is never-ending and getting worse.” But helicopter parents aren’t always to blame. Many students internalize the anxiety and put the pressure on themselves, Madeline Levine, co-founder of Challenge Success, a nonprofit aimed at improving student well-being, told the Times.

Another expert, psychiatrist Stephanie Eken, said despite the cultural differences, there’s a lot of overlap among teens regarding what makes them anxious. Eken mentions factors range from school, family conflicts, what food to eat, diseases, how they’re perceived by friends and notably in the last few years, Eken told the Times, to a rising fear about terrorism. “They wonder about whether it’s safe to go to a movie theater,” she said.

A lack of close, meaningful relationships is also a major factor. Experts have long said mental and physical changes associated with puberty (青春期) may leave teens at higher risk for anxiety. And social media doesn’t help, Eken said, adding that teens are always comparing themselves with their friends, which leaves them miserable.

When Times reporter Benoit Denizet-Lewis visited Mountain Valley, a nonprofit that offers teens need-based assistance for $910 a day, a college student at the facility said, “I don’t think we realize how much it’s affecting our moods and personalities. Social media is a tool, but it’s become this thing that we can’t live without but that’s making us crazy.”

7 . There is an upside to feeling angry. According to research, anger is more helpful at motivating people to overcome obstacles and meet goals than a neutral emotional state.

    1    

Being relentlessly positive and leaning on happy platitudes (陈词滥调), also known as “toxic positivity," can harm us. Most positivity lingo (行话) lacks minor difference, compassion and curiosity and it comes in the form of blanket statements that tell someone how to feel. The truth is that we are born with all the emotions and we evolved to experience negative emotions, including anger.

Unpack your anger

The first step is to recognize that you're angry. Ask yourself: What am I feeling right now? What is this about?     2    Anger can also derive from emotions that shake us up, like shame, humiliation or the feeling of being unappreciated, or when we sense that our beliefs or values are under attack.

Set a healthy goal

When anger surfaces, it is important to remember your overall goal. Expressing anger and having a confrontational discussion can improve the relationship, provided that your goal is to strengthen the relationship, express your needs or come to a compromise.     3    

Learn to harness anger at work

    4     For example, someone who didn't receive the annual review or promotion they wanted could use that anger to plan out steps to do better next year.

Finally, be cautious about releasing

Finding an outlet can feelgood.       5     Try to get social support from people who can be objective.

9 . Researchers at LMU, the Max Planck Institute, and the University of Oxford have investigated how sleep affects memory. They found a link between breathing and the emergence of certain brain activity patterns in sleep that are associated with the reactivation of memory contents. The data points to possible consequences of unhealthy breathing on memory.

In 2021, researchers led by Dr. Thomas Schreiner, leader of the Emmy research group, had already shown there was a direct relationship between the emergence of certain sleep-related brain activity patterns and the reactivation of memory contents during sleep. However, it was still unclear whether these rhythms are orchestrated by a central pacemaker. So the researchers joined up with scientists from other institutions to reanalyze the data. Their results have identified respiration as a potential pacemaker. “That is to say, our breathing influences how memories are consolidated during sleep,” says Schreiner.

For their original study, the researchers showed 20 participants 120 images over the course of two sessions. All the pictures were associated with certain words. Then the participants slept for around two hours in the laboratory. When they awoke, they were questioned about the associations they had learned. During the entire learning and sleep period, their brain activity was recorded by means of EEG, along with their breathing.

The researchers discovered that previously learned contents were spontaneously reactivated by the sleeping brain during the presence of so-called sleep spindles (short phases of increased brain activity). “The precision of the coupling of these sleep-related brain rhythms increases from childhood to adolescence and then declines again during aging,” says Schreiner.

“Though other studies had already established a connection between breathing and cognition during wake, our work makes clear that respiration is also important for memory processing during sleep,” says Schreiner.

Older people often suffer from sleep disorders, respiratory disorders, and declining memory function. Schreiner plans to further investigate whether there are connections between these phenomena and whether interventions — such as the use of CPAP masks, which are already used to treat sleep apnea — make sense from a cognitive perspective.