Everyone should be so lucky as to have a friend like Francia Raisa. On Thursday, singer and actress Selena Gomez, 25, used Instagram to explain why she was “laying low” this summer. She posted a photo of herself in a hospital bed with her friend Francia Raisa holding hands. She said she recently received a kidney transplant from her best friend because of complications(并发症) from lupus(狼疮), an autoimmune disease, which means it is the result of the immune system attacking normal tissue, including the kidneys, brain, heart and lungs.

People with lupus may first experience tiredness, joint pain or a little bit of rash(皮疹) on their bodies and can go for a long time before their doctors realize it is more serious. Many people see two or four doctors before the real problem is picked up. According to Dr. Kyriakos Kirou, roughly a third to one-half of people with lupus develop kidney disease, and up to one in five of them will eventually need a transplant, sometimes because they weren’t treated with effective drugs to prevent the immune system from attacking the kidneys. Though Gomez said that she was “very well now,” she warned about the dangers of not taking medical diagnoses seriously, like she initially did.

Her Instagram post also called attention to two major health topics: the need for living organ donators and the fact that Gomez represents three groups more likely to be diagnosed with lupus and lupus-related kidney disease. Nine out of 10 people diagnosed with lupus are women, and most develop the disease between the ages of 15 to 44. And lupus is two to three times more common among women of color, including Hispanic women, according to the Lupus Foundation.

Raisa is Latina, and Gomez’s father is of Mexican origin. While it’s not essential that the organ donator and receiver be of the same ethnicity, people who share a similar background sometimes are better matched, according to data from the United Network for Organ Sharing.

The moon and its possible influence over human behaviors have been objects of tales for centuries. Although the full moon can't turn people into werewolves (狼人), some people do blame it for causing a bad night's sleep or discomfort.

To find out if lunar phases (月相) affected humans, an international group of researchers studied children to see if their sleeping patterns changed or if there were any differences in their daily activities. The research studied a total of 5, 812 children from five continents. Data collection took place over 28 months, which is the same as the number of lunar cycles. These were then divided into three lunar phases: full moon, half-moon and new moon.

The findings of the study indicated that in general, sleep duration around full moon reported an average decrease of five minutes compared to new moon. “Our study provides evidence that the moon doesn't seem to influence people's behaviors,” said Dr. Jean-Philippe Chaput from the Eastern Ontario Research Institute. The only significant finding was one percent sleep decrease in full moon. However, sleeping for five minutes less time during a full moon is not a danger to health. “Our behaviors are largely influenced by many other factors like genes, education and income,” he added.

“Folk tales and even certain examples suggest that behaviors of humans and animals are affected by lunar phases,” Dr. Chaput explained. “Whether there is science behind it or not, the moon secret will continue to attract human civilizations in the years to come.”

Kim Stemple was a special-education teacher In 2012, she found herself ________ to an IV (静脉注射) in a Boston hospital being ________ for one of several diseases she had been diagnosed with, including lupus (狼疮) The normally lively Stemple was ________ getting upset a lot. And then a friend gave her a ________.

Before she got too sick to ________, Stemple had been a marathon runner. The medal came from a racing ________ who had just finished a half marathon in Las Vegas and hoped the present would ________ a kind of similar pick-me-up (提神剂). It worked like a(n) ________ —and then some.

After Stemple ________ the medal from her hospital IV pole, other patients said they wanted medals too. That got Stemple ________. “A medal is a simple way to give a(n) ________ message,” she told pilotonline. com. And so was born her ________, We Finish Together, which collects medals from ________ —runners, dancers, swimmers, singers, and even spelling bee winners—and donates them to all sorts of people in ________.

Receivers have included hospital patients, people of homeless shelters, and old soldiers. Part of the process is ________ with the donators writing a personalized ________ on the ribbon (缎带). “This gives them a connection to someone,” says Stemple. “If they receive a medal, they will know someone ________.”

Can a simple medal really make a ________? Yes, says Joan Musarra, who develops pulmonary fibrosis (肺纤维). “I opened my package containing my new medal and the notes of positive, warm thoughts. I was ________,” she wrote to Stemple. “At that moment, I was sitting on my sofa breathing through an oxygen tube because my lungs have become so worse. It means so much to me to feel that I am not ________.”