Anyone can write a baby poem, and everyone enjoys reading them, young and old. Baby shower(婴儿洗礼) poems can have rhythm and rhyme, but they certainly don't have to. Poems can be either long or short, but short is probably best for your typical baby shower needs. You can add a little humor as well!

    The people who are most often touched by baby shower poems are those who have had children themselves. Sweet poems can remind them of the time when their little ones were still young. No one will appreciate them more than the family members themselves. If you are a creative writer or  have a special talent for putting words together in a special way, then you should try writing your own baby shower poems. This would make a great gift idea as well.

    If you decide to write your own baby poems, even common things can inspire you. Inspiration can be found anywhere. Look to your own memories from the past. What was special about your childhood? What special object have you treasured over the years? What words of wisdom(智慧) of advice could you pass on to the next generation? Look around the house and imagine a baby being there. What do you see, hear, or feel? Let those thoughts be the source of your best baby poems.

    When writing a baby poem, you do not have to write like Shakespeare, you just have to be sincere. Years later when the baby has grown，think of how special they will feel knowing the words were just for them.

    If you are not the creative type — don't worry! There are lots of places online where you can look for poems saying just the things you want to say. Poems have been written on all subjects throughout the ages, and baby poems and baby shower poems are no exception. A quick search online doesn't have to take any time at all.

    October might seem to be pumpkin month in the U.S. The holiday of Halloween (万圣节) comes on October 31. Americans around the country are already using social media to show off their pumpkin growing and carving skills.

    Pumpkins are round, orange fruits related to squashes (南瓜小果) and gourds (葫芦). People use their flesh and seeds for food, but they are also popular decorations in the fall.

    Two big pumpkins recently made headlines in the U.S. A farmer in the northeastern state of Rhode Island broke the record for the largest pumpkin ever grown in North America. Richard Wallace's pumpkin weighed 1,026 kilograms. It broke his son's record from 2015. Ron Wallace's pumpkin only weighed 1,011 kilograms last year. A schoolteacher in the northwestern state of Washington brought her large pumpkin to an event in California. Her pumpkin was the champion, weighing 866 kilograms. It turns out that Cindy Tobeck's pumpkin grew from one of the seeds from Ron Wallace's pumpkin from 2015.

    While those pumpkins are large, they are still not the largest in the world. According to the website BigPumpkins.com, Richard Wallace's pumpkin is only the second-heaviest pumpkin of the year. A man in Belgium produced a pumpkin that weighed almost 1,200 kilograms. Smithsonian magazine wrote a story about people who try to grow large pumpkins. In 35 years, the size of record pumpkins has grown from about 225 kilograms to over 1,000 kilograms. Pumpkin farmers trying to grow record fruits are taking the seeds of champion pumpkins from one year and breeding them with other large pumpkins.

    But people are not just growing pumpkins. They are carving them, too. One Twitter user from Britain recently posted a photo of a pumpkin designed to look like U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump. No word of a Hillary Clinton pumpkin design. But one pumpkin farmer in California allows visitors to shoot small pumpkins out of a cannon（大炮）. The targets? Large paper cut-outs of both Trump and Clinton.

    I had an old neighbor, a doctor named Gibbs. When Doctor Gibbs wasn't saving lives, he was planting trees. He had some interesting theories about planting trees. He hardly watered his new trees.

    Once I asked why and he told me that watering plants damaged them because it made them grow weaker. He said he had to make things difficult for the trees so that only the strongest could survive. He talked about how watering trees made them develop shallow roots and how, if they were not watered, trees would grow deep roots in search of water.

    So, instead of watering his trees every morning, he'd beat them with a rolled up newspaper. I asked him why he did that, and he said it was to get the trees' attention.

    Doctor Gibbs died a couple of years after I left home. Sometimes I walked by his house and looked at the trees I'd watched him plant 25 years ago. They were tall and strong.

    I planted several trees myself a few years ago. Two years of caring for these trees meant they grew up weakly. Whenever a cold wind blew, my trees trembled. Adversity seemed to benefit Doctor Gibb's trees in ways comfort and ease never could.

    Every night before I go to bed, I check on my two sons. I often pray that their lives will be easy. But lately I've been thinking that it's time to change my prayer. I know my children are going to experience difficulties. There's always a cold wind blowing somewhere. What we need to do is to pray for deep roots, so when the rains fall and the winds blow, we won't be torn apart.

    Smile! It makes everyone in the room feel better because they, consciously or unconsciously, are smiling with you. Growing evidence shows that an instinct for facial mimicry(模仿) allows us to empathize with and even experience other people's feelings. If we can't mirror another person's face, it limits our ability to read and properly react to their expressions. A review of this emotional mirroring appears on February 11 in Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

    In their paper, Paula Niedenthal and Adrienne Wood, social psychologists at the University of Wisconsin, describe how people in social situations copy others' facial expressions to create emotional responses in themselves. For example, if you're with a friend who looks sad, you might "try on" that sad face yourself without realizing you're doing so. In "trying on" your friend's expression, it helps you to recognize what they're feeling by associating it with times in the past when you made that expression. Humans get this emotional meaning from facial expressions in a matter of only a few hundred milliseconds.

    "You reflect on your emotional feelings and then you generate some sort of recognition judgment, and the most important thing that results in is that you take the appropriate action—you approach the person or you avoid the person," Niedenthal says. "Your own emotional reaction to the face changes your perception of how you see the face in such a way that provides you with more information about what it means."

    A person's ability to recognize and "share" others' emotions can be prevented when they can't mimic faces. This is a common complaint for people with motor diseases, like facial paralysis(瘫痪) from a stroke, or even due to nerve damage from plastic surgery. Niedenthal notes that the same would not be true for people who suffer from paralysis from birth, because if you've never had the ability to mimic facial expressions, you will have developed compensatory ways of interpreting emotions.

    People with social disorders associated with mimicry or emotion-recognition damage, like autism(自闭症), can experience similar challenges. "There are some symptoms in autism where lack of facial mimicry may in part be due to limitation of eye contact," Niedenthal says.

    Niedenthal next wants to explore what part in the brain is functioning to help with facial expression recognition. A better understanding of that part, she says, will give us a better idea of how to treat related disorders.

    Prosocial behaviors are those intended to help other people. Behaviors that can be described as prosocial include feeling empathy(同感) and concern for others and behaving in ways to help or benefit other people.

    Prosocial behavior has long posed a challenge to social scientists seeking to understand why people engage in helping behaviors that are beneficial to others, but costly to the individual performing the action. Why would people do something that benefits someone else but offers no immediate benefit to the doer?

    Psychologists suggest that there are a number of reasons why people engage in prosocial behavior. In many cases, such behaviors are fostered during childhood and adolescence as adults encourage children to share, act kindly, and help others. Prosocial behaviors are often seen as being compelled by a number of factors including egoistic reasons (doing things to improve one's self­image), reciprocal benefits (doing something nice for someone so that they may one day return the favor), and more altruistic reasons (performing actions purely out of empathy for another individual).

    Characteristics of the situation can also have a powerful impact on whether or not people engage in prosocial actions. The bystander effect is one of the most notable examples of how the situation can impact helping behaviors. The bystander effect refers to the tendency for people to become less likely to assist a person in distress when there are a number of other people also present. For example, if you drop your purse and several items fall out on the ground, the likelihood that someone will stop and help you decreases if there are many other people present. This same sort of thing can happen in cases where someone is in serious danger, such as when someone is involved in a car accident. In some cases, witnesses might assume that since there are so many other present, someone else will have surely already called for help.

    Why do people help in some situations but not in others? Experts have discovered a number of different situational variables that contribute to (and sometimes interfere with) prosocial behaviors. First, the more people that are present decreases the amount of personal responsibility people feel in a situation. People also tend to look to others for how to respond in such situations, particularly if the event contains some level of ambiguity. Fear of being judged by other members of the group also plays a role. People sometimes fear leaping to assistance, only to discover that their help was unwanted or unwarranted. In order to avoid being judged by other bystanders, people simply take no action.

    Experts have suggested that some key things must happen in order for a person to take action.

    Retired jet engines could help clear the smog that smothered big cities.

    To land at Indira Gandhi Airport is to descend from clear skies to brown ones. New Delhi's air is poisonous. According to the World Health Organization, India's capital has the most polluted atmosphere of all the world's big cities. The government is trying to introduce rules that will curb emissions-allowing private cars to be driven only on alternate days, for example, and enforcing better emissions standards for all vehicles.

    But implementing these ideas, even if that can be done successfully, will change things only slowly. A quick fix would help. And Moshe Alamaro, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thinks he has one. His idea is to take a jet engine, put it next to one of India's dirty coal-fired power plants, point its exhaust nozzle at the sky and then switch it on. His hope is that the jet's exhaust will disrupt a meteorological phenomenon known as "inversion", in which a layer of warm air settles over cooler air, trapping it, and that the rising stream of exhaust will carry off the tiny particles of matter that smog is composed of. Inversion exacerbates air pollution in Delhi and in many other cities, from Los Angeles to Tehran. A particularly intense example caused the Great Smog of London in 1952, when four days of air pollution contributed to 12,000 deaths.

    Dr Alamaro thinks a jet engine could punch through the inversion layer to create a "virtual chimney" which would carry the trapped pollution above it, so that it could be dispersed in the wider atmosphere. He calculates that all the emissions from a gigawatt coal-fired power plant could be lifted away using a single engine with a nozzle speed of 460 metres a second.

    However, he has not calculated whether a jet engine could disrupt the inversion layer and allow the pollution to escape the city-so he is now going to test that hypothesis. Within eight months, Dr Alamaro plans to put one of his updrafters next to a coal-fired power plant and monitor what happens using a fleet of drones. He is in discussions with Tata Group, a conglomerate with an electricity-generating arm, to run it next to one of the firm's power stations.