In Grade 3, we used to have a scavenger hunt(寻物游戏) at school. We gathered up chalks, pencils, stones and other little things. It was a close race. I was out of breath when I reached the clover (三叶草) area to search for the last, most hard-to-find thing: a four-leaf clover. I believed I would win. I had a trump card(王牌). The thing is that I have always been able to find four-leaf clovers. I just see them.

I spent my childhood collecting and putting four-leaf clovers into books at my mother's house. I started with her big cloth-and leather-wrapped books, like the complete works of Shakespeare. When running out of the delicate works, I began slipping those collected into anything I could find, like cookbooks. The same is true in my house today. Shake a book, and a clover will just appear.

Two years ago, while waiting at the airport, I found a four-leaf clover and put it into my passport. On the way home, my husband and I were upgraded to the business class. Friends owed our luck to the clover. I thought it was because a flight cancellation left us stuck for many nights and a customer service representative took pity on us.

People disagree about whether the luck lies in the finding or in the possession of a four-leaf clover. Some believe that the luck is lost if the clover is even shown to somebody else, while others think the luck doubles if it's given away. I believe that it is increased by sharing. I feel lucky to find the clovers so often, but I don't think they influence my life any more than it does to share anything a little special- that momentary closeness between you and a friend or a stranger, as you all lean in to wonder at a rare find.

Now I’m glad to share a recipe for quickly finding four-leaf clovers. I learned it from a friend when I was 30. She said, “Firstly, I love four-leaf clovers: their smell; their difference. Besides, do you remember those posters with dots? If you looked too hard, all you saw was the pattern. But if you let your eyes slip out of focus, scenes would appear. It’s the same with four-leaf clovers. Try slipping into a lazy, soft focus, skimming the clovers. Make your hand across clovers. Appreciate the ones with three leaves. And a four-leaf clover may come up.”

Bird expert Stephen Kress remembers the first time he encountered puffins (角嘴海雀). “I was totally amazed from the moment I saw them,” he says. Two years after his first encounter, while teaching at a nature camp in Maine, Kress learned that the state's puffin colonies were all but destroyed by hunters in the late 1800s. The puffins were killed for their eggs, meat and feathers.

Kress decided to learn more about these “special birds.” His fascination grew into Project Puffin, a decades-long effort to bring the puffins back to Maine. Kress ran the project while working for the National Audubon Society, a major bird conservation nonprofit in the US.

Project Puffin’s origins lie on an uninhabited seven-acre island, six miles off the coast of Maine, called Easter Egg Rock. The tiny island, accessible only by rowboat, is free from predators (捕食者) and edged with rocks under which the puffins nest.

Starting in 1973, Kress’s team collected chicks from Greet Island, off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, which had a healthy puffin population. The team hand -raised puffins in artificial holes, feeding them vitamin-enriched fish twice a day. “They would come out when they were six weeks old and they would work their way to the edge of the island and swim off,” says Kress.

For four years, however, none of the birds returned to the island to breed (繁殖). The project’s supporters began to question whether they would ever succeed. “That's when I began trying to think like a puffin,” Kress says.“Puffins nest in colonies because they like being with others of their kind and large groups provide protection from predators.” He thought that the young puffins did remember the island but were not brave to come ashore. Kress’s new idea was to place wooden puffins around the island, to help the birds feel safe. It worked.

Thanks to his pioneering method, Project Puffin says there are now around 1,300 pairs of puffins nesting on islands in the Gulf of Maine. What's more, the techniques Kress developed to save puffins are now used by seabird conservationists around the world.

It's no secret that social media can make the lines on what's reality and what's fantasy unclear. But new research at York's Faculty of Health now shows how young women interact with images online can affect how they feel about their own bodies.

The research appears in the journal Body Image. The study was conducted by Jennifer Mills, associate professor in the Department of Psychology and Jacqueline Hogue. It focused on young women, aged 18 to 27 years old, who liked or commented on photos of people whom they considered to be more attractive than themselves.

The research included 118 female college students from countries all over the world. Participants reported their ages, diverse ethnic groups, whether English was their first language, and years of education in an online questionnaire six weeks before the experiment. Each participant was given a questionnaire where they had to indicate how satisfied or dissatisfied they were with their appearance or body image by using a specific standard.

Participants were then randomly assigned into one of two experimental conditions. One group of participants were asked to log into Facebook and Instagram for a period of five or more minutes and find one peer (同龄人) who they felt was more attractive than themselves. After looking at the photos, each participant was asked to leave a comment of their choice. In the other group, participants were asked to do the same task but this time they commented on a post of a family member whom they did not think was more attractive than themselves.

The results showed that these young adult women felt worse about their own appearance after looking at social media pages of someone that they considered to be more attractive than themselves. Even if they felt bad about themselves before they came into the study, on average, they still felt worse after completing the task. However, the data showed that participants’ views on their own appearance were not affected when interacting with the posts of their family members.