5 . Move over, helicopter parents. “Snowplow (扫雪机) parents” are the newest reflection of an intensive (强化的) parenting style that can include parents booking their adult children haircuts, texting their college kids to wake them up so they don’t sleep through a test, and even calling their kids’ employers.

Helicopter parenting, the practice of wandering anxiously near one’s children, monitoring their every activity, is so 20th century. Some rich mothers and fathers now are more like snowplows: machines moving ahead, clearing any difficulties in their children’s path to success, so they don’t have to suffer failure, frustration (挫折) or lose opportunities.

It starts early, when parents get on wait lists for excellent preschools before their babies are born and try to make sure their kids never do anything that may frustrate them. It gets more intense when school starts: running forgotten homework to school or calling a coach to request that their children make the team.

Rich parents may have more time and money to devote to making sure their children don’t ever meet with failure, but it’s not only rich parents practicing snowplow parenting. This intensive parenting has become the most welcome way to raise children, regardless of income, education, or race.

Yes, it’s a parent’s job to support the children, and to use their adult wisdom to prepare for the future when their children aren’t mature enough to do so. That’s why parents hide certain toys from babies to avoid getting angry or take away a teenager’s car keys until he finishes his college applications.

But snowplow parents can take it too far, some experts say. If children have never faced a difficulty, what happens when they get into the real world?

“Solving problems, taking risks and overcoming frustration are key life skills,” many child development experts say, “and if parents don’t let their children experience failure, the children don’t acquire them.”

6 . Terrible working conditions have a long tradition. Early industry was marked by its dirty, dangerous factories. In the early 20th century workers were forced into dull, repetitive tasks by the needs of the production line. However, in a service-based economy, it makes sense that focusing on worker morale might be a much more fruitful approach.

Proving this is more difficult. But that is the aim of a new study targeting workers at British Telecom. Three academics---Clement of Erasmus University, Rotterdam, of Oxford and George Ward of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology---surveyed 1,800 sales workers at 11 British call centres. All each employee had to do was click on a simple emoji each week to indicate their level of happiness. Those workers were charged with selling customers broadband, telephone and television deals. In total the authors collected adequate responses from 1,161 people over a six-month period.

The results were striking. Workers made 13% more sales in weeks when they were happy than when they were unhappy. This was not because they were working longer hours; in happy weeks, they made more calls per hour and were more efficient at turning those calls into sales. The tricky part, however, is determining the direction of causation(因果关系).Workers may be happier when they are selling more because they expect a bigger bonus.

The academics tried a clever way to get round this causation problem by examining a very British issue---the weather. Workers turned out to be less happy on days when the weather in their local area was bad and this unhappiness converted into lower sales. Since they were making national calls, not local ones, it is unlikely that customer unhappiness with the weather was driving the sales numbers. So it was worker mood driving sales, not the other way round.

Even if this reasoning proves to be correct, businesses may not find it of comfort. The academics point out that "what we are not able to do is making an official decision as to whether investing in improving employee happiness makes good business sense". It is possible that the costs of such investment might outweigh any gains in productivity.

More research is clearly needed. But there is evidence that happier workers are good news for shareholders(持股人), as well as productivity. Analysts found the firms where workers gave the best reviews easily outperformed those where employees gave a thumbs down.

7 . There are few things in life are annoying: you are in the middle of a conversation with a friend, and suddenly she bursts out laughing, making you think you've made a brilliant joke. But then she says, ''Sorry, I wasn't laughing at you. I just saw something really fun on a micro blog. '' The Guardian described the scene of a friend's face buried in a as ''a distinctly 2lst-century problem''. A new word has be to describe this—phubbing. It is the act of looking at your mobile phone instead of paying attention to others during a social interaction(互动). Like pointing at one's nose, phubbing is widely considered rude behavior. People everywhere are beginning to lose patience with the phenomenon.

A Stop Phubbing campaign group has been started in Australia and at least five others have sprung up in its wake as anger about the lack of manners grows. The campaign's creator, Alex Haigh, 23, from Melbourne, said, ''A group of friends and I were chatting when someone raised how annoying being ignored by people on mobiles was. '' He has created a website where companies can download posters to discourage phubbing.

Phubbing is just one symptom(征兆)of our increasing dependence on mobile phones and the Internet which is replacing normal social interaction. A survey found that one out of three Britons would answer the phone in a restaurant and 19% said they would while being served in a shop. The survey comes after a supermarket assistant in south London refused to serve a woman until she stopped using her phone.

Time magazine once pointed out, ''Phubbing has a much greater potential harm to real-life connections by making people around us feel like we care more about posts than their presence. ''

In the UK, Glamour magazine even imagined how novelist Jane Austen (1775-1817) would have written about people with bad mobile phone manners; ''It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man or woman in possession of a good mobile phone must be in want of manners. ''

8 . If you could change your child's DNA in the future to protect them against diseases, would you? It could be possible because of technology known as CRISPR- Cas, or just CRISPR.

CRISPR involves a piece of RNA, a chemical messenger, designed to work on one part of DNA； it also uses an enzyme (If) that can take unwanted genes out and put new ones in, according to The Economist. There are other ways of editing DNA, but CRISPR will do it very simply, quickly, and exactly.

The uses of CRISPR could mean that cures are developed for everything from Alzheimer's to cancer to HIV. By allowing doctors to put just the right cancer-killing genes into a patient's immune system, the technology could help greatly.

In April scientists in China said they had tried using CRISPR to edit the genomes (基因组)of human embryos. Though the embryos would never turn into humans, this was the first time anyone had ever tried to edit DNA from human beings. With this in mind, the US' National Academy of Sciences plans to discuss questions about CRISPR s ethics(伦理问题).For example_? CRISPR doesn't work properly yet. As well as cutting the DNA it is looking for, it often cuts other DNA, too. In addition, we currently seem to have too little understanding of what DNA gives people what qualities.

There are also moral questions around playing God”. Of course, medicine already stops natural things from happening-for example, it saves people from infections. The opportunities to treat diseases make it hard to say we shouldn't keep going.

A harder question is whether it is ever right to edit human germ-line(种系)cells and make changes that are passed on to children. This is banned in 40 countries and restricted in many others. However, CRISPR means that if genes can be edited out, they can also be edited back in. It may be up to us as a society to decide when and where editing the genome is wrong.

Also, according to The Economist, gene editing may mean that parents make choices that are not obviously in the best interests of their children: “Deaf parents may prefer their children to be deaf too； parents might want to make their children more intelligent at all costs.

In the end, more research is still needed to see what we can and can't do with CRISPR. “It's still a huge mystery how we work,” Craig Mello_? a UMass Medical School biologist and Nobel Prize winner, told The Boston Globe, "We're just trying to figure out this amazingly complicated thing we call life.

9 . Putting children in daycare helps working parents take their minds off childcare.     1    

How daycare negatively affects children is related to many factors. One study has suggested that some children who spend long hours in daycare centers experience more stress than those who spend more time in a setting with a mother.

Another study has shown that children who are shy have a higher level of the hormone cortisol (皮质醇) which is released when an individual shows signs of stress.     2     And as a result the child may not mix well with the other children and the teachers at the daycare center, a situation that can cause stress.

Another negative impact of daycare is that there is less communication between a mother and her child.     3     So it is essential for a child to develop a deep bond with his or her mother, since this will lay the foundation for all the relationships he or she will form later on in life. Children who spend a lot of time with their mothers experience healthy social and emotional development, while long hours in daycare can disrupt this bonding. Children who lose out on precious mother-child bonding are observed to have behavioral problems as they grow older.

Children in daycare centers also feel unprotected compared to children at home. In a daycare center, when one caregiver attends to more than one child at the same time, she may not be able to look deeply into why a child is mixing well or not.     4     Another negative aspect of daycare is that children there are more likely to fall ill if they come in contact with sick children.

    5     Well-maintained daycare centers contribute a great deal to the overall development of a child by providing a structured environment. Children become more social by interacting with other children of the same age, and learn new activities that are not always available if they are brought up only at home.

10 . Violent Games: Fun or Harmful?

If you play lots of video games, you’ve probably blown a zombie(僵尸) into tiny bits.     1     Many adults worry that playing such games could make children act violently in real life. Is that true?

The American Academy of Pediatrics(儿科) says that violence in any kind of media --- from TV to music to video games --- presents a risk to kids’ health. A number of studies have shown a link between video games and aggression, including one published in JAMA Pediatrics in 2014, which found that kids who played violent video games showed an increase in aggressive thoughts and behaviors.     2    

But not all studies agree that violent games cause kids to act out. Another study replaced violent deaths with evaporation(蒸发) in a game.     3     People who played the non-violent game without any training were more aggressive afterward than people who played the violent version but learned to control themselves first.

And here’s an even stranger fact: When violent video games are released, people carry out fewer violent crimes! Why?     4     Steve Levitt, coauthor of the book Freakonomics, said, “If you can make video games fun enough, then kids will stop watching TV, and they’ll stop going out and creating violent disorder on the street.”

What do you think?     5