“I challenge you to a hundred-meter race,” my opponent, Julius, declared. He had beaten me countless times during practice, but I wanted to prove him wrong for a change. “That’ll wipe the smile off his face!” I thought, even as fear started to pour in my stomach. He was well-known around the school for being the fastest runner on the track-and-field team, while I tailed behind in second place- a respectable position, but not yet good enough to surpass (超过) him. Nevertheless, I shook his hand and said, “Challenge accepted!” However, negative thoughts flooded my mind. Would I be able to win? After all, Julius’ speed of light would guarantee a sure win!

Soon, all my friends and the teachers had gathered around to watch the challenge. “Oh no, I will lose and be embarrassed in front of the whole school!” I spoke in a low voice. Nevertheless, I turned my worried expression into a determined smile. To keep myself from sinking into self-doubt, I did some stretches and jumping jacks to warm up my body.

Finally, the crucial moment arrived. The referee(裁判)fired the starting gun and we took off like a shot. Adrenaline(肾上腺素) rocketed through my body as I launched myself forward. True to my expectations, Julius caught up with me easily and was in the lead! “No way will I lose! Victory, here I come!” I motivated myself as anger coursed through my body. As the race progressed, my eyes locked onto Julius, his athletic form effortlessly moving ahead. His quick steps and strong focus showcased his impressive skills. Yet, I refused to let doubt consume me. A fierce fire burnt within, fueled by a mix of unwillingness to admit defeat and anger. How dare he assume he was unbeatable? With every step, my determination solidified(变坚定), and my resolve to surpass him strengthened.

“Faster!” I screamed and in that instant, I felt like Superman.

“Yi Rou! Yi Rou! Yi Rou!” The whole school was cheering my name!

I was a 15-year-old girl when my beloved grandma Rosie was placed in a group home in Brookfield because of sharply declining memory. I can vividly remember the unpleasant environments inside the nursing home. That impression has ultimately impacted me in a very great way, even after I graduated from university with a degree in architecture.

Grandma Rosie was the heart of our family. Her little two-bedroom home was truly where all her children and grandchildren gathered. She was also an amazing cook and her specialty was fried pork steak. Most of my nephews and nieces were fans of her specialty. She lived alone after my grandpa passed away but was cared by many relatives and friends. When she was in her late 60s, we began to witness a significant memory impairment (受损) in her. Everyone started checking up on her. A frequent question that people would ask her, “What did you have for dinner?”, almost always brought the same answer — fried pork steak. Every day she would report making fried pork steak. One day a group of us went to her house secretly, and found she was making fried pork steak!

After some lengthy consideration, our family were concerned for her condition and ultimately decided to place Rosie in a group home in Brookfield. A year later, Rosie caught heart disease and her condition required her to be moved to a nursing home in Oconomowoc. Her memory also declined sharply and she no longer remembered our names. It was heartbreaking for our family to know that.

By that time, I was in high school and thinking about plans for college. Seeing the cold, sterile (呆板的) long hallways and unfriendly surroundings in the nursing home, I was determined to become a professional architect concentrating on senior care and health care design. I wanted to design living space where seniors can not only live but benefit from lovely environments.

Bearing this goal in mind, I worked extremely hard.

Finally, Grandma Rosie moved into a senior living community I designed.

Alice had been optimistic and the heart of her family. Unfortunately, one day cancer attacked her brain. Although suffering from illness, Alice remained a source of encouragement, especially for Jenny, her 12-year-old daughter. Alice often read inspiring stories to her, helped with her homework, and cheered her up to solve difficulties bravely. When Alice’s condition worsened, the family’s daily life was enveloped in the shadow of uncertainty and sorrow.

In her final days, Alice made a video without letting Jenny know, and handed it to her husband John. She wanted Jenny to remember her when she grew up, not as the woman weakened by illness, but as the loving and optimistic mother she had always been.

After Alice’s passing, Jenny put her mother’s photographs in a box and locked herself in her own room. For her, going into the empty living room where she and her mother read together was heartbreaking. Even the routine of going to school, once a joyful activity shared with her mother, now became an unbearable pain. John tried his best to ease the pain left by Alice. He cooked Jenny her favorite meals, read bedtime stories, and even tried braiding (编) her hair, just the way Alice used to do. But Jenny, lost in sorrow, found little comfort in these efforts.

“Dad, I won’t go to school. I just want to be left alone,” Jenny shouted, her voice full of anger and hopelessness, when John asked her to prepare for school. John understood her pain but felt helpless. That was when he decided to show Jenny the video Alice had made. He hoped that hearing her mother’s voice might bring some comfort to Jenny. Gently walking upstairs and knocking on Jenny’s door, he entered with a video player. “Your mom left something for you,” he said, trying to mask his own sadness with a hopeful smile. Jenny, still teary-eyed, hesitated but eventually pressed the “play” button.

Immediately, Alice’s smiling face appeared on the screen.

Jenny stepped out of her room with a smile on her face.

5 . With artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic technology improving at impressive rates, there are some who worry that there’s a risk of artistic and creative people being replaced. A new study by the Korean Institute of Industrial Technology, however, is showing exactly why that can’t and shouldn’t happen. It all started when the South Korean company posed this question: Can robots replace conductors?

Over a year ago, work to develop automaton (自动化) began. At first, it was designed like a machine, and didn’t live up to expectations. Then the company sought ways to improve it. In the end, it was given two arms with joints to copy wrists and elbows, allowing it to move a stick similarly to how a human conductor would move it. It was named the EverR 6 robot, and stands at 1.8 meters. It was finally time to figure out how it could follow through on its musical role.

“We got involved in this project to see how far robots can go in more creative fields like the arts, and what the challenges are,” Dong-wook Lee, a senior researcher at the Korean Institute of Industrial Technology said.

In order to pull this off, Dong-wook Lee cooperated with the Busan Philharmonic Orchestra. The 12-minute piece they planned to perform, “Feel” by Il-hoon Son, was created specifically for this event. It was created with the strengths of both EverR 6 and the human conductor, Soo-yeol Choi, in mind.

To pull off this impressive performance, the robot was preprogrammed to conduct through 30 cycles of beat patterns. Meanwhile, it was up to the human conductor to lead the orchestra in creating an improvisational (即兴的) score, adding depth to the otherwise planned piece.

Together, they pulled off a masterful performance that the audience seemed more than happy to have had the opportunity to witness it firsthand!

With the concert having gone so well, this is only the start of EverR 6. Still, no matter the improvements they’re able to make to this Android robot, the human conductor isn’t concerned about being replaced.

“Let’s leave the accuracy to the robots,” Soo-yeol Choi said, “but the musical and artistic aspects to a human conductor.”

6 . In July 1915, sick James Murray, one of the early editors of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), defined one final word. He had devoted 36 years to the dictionary. Knowing he would not see the project complete, he wrote his last entry: for “twilight”.

The story of Murray’s final days is one of many memorable tales in “The Dictionary People”. Conceived (构思) in 1857, the OED was a huge crowdsourcing project comprising 3,000 people. The idea was to create a “descriptive” dictionary that tracked words’ use and meaning over time. Volunteers read widely, mailing in examples of how “rare, old-fashioned, new” words were used. What is surprising about this random method is that it worked, achieving order through the large number of contributors.

The origin story of Sarah Ogilvie’s book is almost as improbable as that of the dictionary itself. Ms Ogilvie, an editor for the OED, went into the archives (档案馆) of Oxford University Press and came across an old notebook. It had belonged to Murray and contained the names and details of the dictionary volunteers, most of whom had previously been unknown. “The Dictionary People” is her work of detective scholarship, presenting the lives behind the names.

The dictionary’s contributors are an engaging cast, including one of Karl Marx’s daughters and J. R. R. Tolkien. For some, the dictionary was something addictive: one contributor supplied 165,061 quotations. Murray, too, was assiduous. He once wrote to George Eliot to ask about a word choice in “Romola”, published 17 years earlier.

Ms Ogilvie’s book is full of strange but interesting tales. Many dictionary lovers engaged in another crowdsourcing fashion: collecting and measuring rainwater. The presentation of the book is irregular, too, taking its structure from the work it describes. For example, in her first chapter, “A for Archaeologist (考古学家),” she relates the early life of Margaret A. Murray, a pioneering Egyptologist. There are 26 alphabetical (按字母顺序排列的) chapters, each celebrating a group of contributors. This is a clever concept.

7 . Jackdaws (寒鸦) are the smallest member of the crow family. They often live in a crowd. Indeed, when cold weather comes, they gather in the hundreds (and sometimes thousands) every evening so that they can sleep in the same place. If you’ve ever heard jackdaws during their evening gatherings and morning departures, you’ll know they are not quiet birds. Despite being fairly low-volume during the day, they are really loud on either side of their night-time get-togethers. Why might this be?

A team of the Cornish Jackdaw Project set out to determine why jackdaws are so noisy before they depart from their sleeping spot. The team’s theory was that the morning calls might be a jackdaw version of   “voting”. The researchers suspected that each individual’s call might count as an “I’m in!”. When a certain amount of “I’m in!”s are called —and so a certain volume of noise is reached -the group might then depart as a unit.

To test this idea, the researchers artificially increased the level of calls during the jackdaws’ natural morning calls. Their expectation was that, if jackdaws really are “voting with their voice” to decide when to depart the sleeping site, artificially adding calls would make them leave earlier than they naturally would have done. Subsequent experiments confirmed their expectation. The team therefore showed that jackdaws use their calls as a sort of voting system.

You might wonder why this happens. The researchers suggest that individual jackdaws benefit from the voting system because they are less at risk of being killed and they can get more access to social information — such as where to find food.

So the loud calls of jackdaws in the morning are therefore not the pure chaos it sounds like. If you are ever being driven mad by the sound in the morning, you can find comfort in the fact that the louder they get, the sooner they will leave you in peace.

8 . Between 1945 and 2000, educators employed a fairly uniform approach. The teacher was the sun in the classroom, and all lessons and activities centered around him or her. Educators stressed the importance of discipline and obedience(服从) within the classroom, and students were expected to follow very rigid standards for behavior and academic performance. The stated goal of this model was to ensure fairness by applying the same expectations; however, the result was that only a few students succeeded while many others were left behind.

When computers and Internet technology entered the classroom a few decades ago, another pattern appeared and progressive educators immediately saw the opportunity to change the way school worked. Instead of needing to focus on the teachers for the vast majority of the day, students could use computers, websites, and even games to learn new materials and improve their skills and knowledge. Not all educators welcomed this shift, however, as some believed it took power and responsibility away from the teachers and cheapened the educational experience for learners.

Over the last decade, two distinct camps of educators have emerged. Tech advocates stress that computers and Internet technology allow students to learn at their own pace in an environment that makes them feel comfortable, while the traditional classroom sets a pace that many learners can’t keep up with and often makes students feel uncomfortable. Traditionalists, on the other hand, believe that over-reliance on tech limits students’ ability to develop their own knowledge and skills and does little to prepare them for the realities of being adults in the real world.

Regrettably, the inability of these two parties to find an agreement has prevented the growth of our education system. We must learn from what worked in the past while adopting the best of our new technologies to create an education system that reflects our modern world. If we can’t get all our teachers on the same page, then we will be at risk of failing future generations.

George had his eye on a scoring record. He took a deep breath as he stood in the doorway,looking in at the basketball court. The gym was old and small, but it held a long history. Maybe today I’ll make history, George thought.

His basketball league was celebrating. Today’s championship game marked its 50th anniversary (周年) since the league’s first championship.

George looked over the brochure for the anniversary. It listed the winners of each championship game and the top scorers. He stopped suddenly when he read the name of the top scorer from a game 30 years before. He quickly went through the rest of the list. “Look!” he said to his teammate David,showing him the brochure.“You see who has the all-time record? My dad! He never told me that.”

“24 points,” David said. “That’s awesome!”

George’s best record was 19 points. He was the Badgers’ top scorer. “It seems that my dad never showed off something like that,”George said.

When his parents arrived, George brought the brochure over to them. His dad laughed. “I didn’t miss a shot in that game. But look at the score. I would have traded every shot for a win,”he said with regret. George hadn’t noticed that his dad’s team had lost the game just by one point.“That was a great group of teammates,”his dad added.“You have great teammates in the Badgers, too.”

As George warmed up, he was still digesting his father’s words. “This will be a struggle every second,”the coach emphasized before they got on court to play.“I want to see tough defense, sharp passing, and, above all, smart play as a team.”

George was confident he could lead the Badgers to victory, just as he did in their previous games against the Lions. And he played really hard. As the game neared its end, George had already scored 23 points. Another basket would break his father’s scoring record.

However, his team was now one point behind the Lions.

With no defenders around, David turned and shot at the basket.

10 . Two powerful NASA telescopes have detected the oldest and most distant black hole ever found. Data collected via energetic X-rays by the Chandra X-ray Observatory and James Webb Space Telescope has helped astronomers spot the signature of a growing black hole within the early universe just 470 million years after the big bang, which occurred 13.8 billion years ago. The discovery, described in a study published in Nature Astronomy, may help astronomers figure out how some of the first supermassive black holes formed in the universe.

“We needed Webb to find this remarkably distant galaxy (星系) and Chandra to find its supermassive black hole, “ said lead study author Akos Bogdan, in a statement. ”We also took advantage of a cosmic magnifying glass (宇宙放大镜) that boosted the amount of light we detected. “ He was referring to an effect called gravitational lensing (引力透镜效应), which occurs when closer objects act like a magnifying glass for distant objects. Gravity essentially twists and strengthens the light of distant galaxies in the background of whatever is doing the magnifying, enabling observations of otherwise invisible features.

Astronomers detected the black hole in a galaxy called UHZ1. At first glance, the galaxy appeared in the same direction as a cluster of galaxies known as Abell 2744, which is located about 3. 5 billion light-years from Earth. But data collected by the Webb telescope showed that UHZl is actually much farther away and located beyond the cluster at 13. 2 billion light-years from Earth.

The team used the Chandra Observatory to detect superheated gas releasing X-rays within UHZ1, the obvious sign of a supermassive black hole growing in size. The detection was made possible by the Abell cluster of galaxies, which intensified the light of the UHZ1 galaxy and the X-rays released by the black hole by a factor of four.

Astronomers think the discovery will help them better understand how supermassive black holes appeared and reached their huge masses so soon after the beginning of the universe.

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