I returned home the other night, tired. My husband asked me how my evening was, “Great.” I told him. I had spent 90 minutes in a gym with 10 Ping-Pong tables and all kinds of players, all playing a little ball over the net. By 9 pm, I was excited, tired, satisfied. I had beaten two young men half my age and lost battles against other competitors. To an observer, the night was common. To me, it was a lucky thing that I hadn't expected.

    I had taken up Ping-Pong during college, and in my 30s took more advanced lessons. However, a serious accident hurt my leg, which made me unable to take exercise. Months later, I tried to play Ping-Pong but my leg pained for a week. I put the game out of my mind.

When I was 53, one day my bad leg was working a little bit better. Could Ping-Pong be possible for me, now—in my condition, at my age? I tried to play Ping-Pong again

    Ping-Pong is a sport which requires endurance(耐力). Players need quick foot work and upper body movements to return balls, requiring faster response time than tennis.

    Playing Ping-Pong offers benefits for the brain. A study of 164 women aged 60 and older showed that Ping-Pong improved cognitive(认知)function more than dancing, walking or gymnastics. “The great thing about our sport is that it can be played by anyone,” said Jimmy Butler, a four-time national USA Table Tennis Association winner. “I see 90-year-olds and 10-year-olds.”

    Years passed and my endurance improved. People started to praise my shots. I won a game. Then I won agin. These days, I feel wonderful, I believe this sport is the fountain (源泉)of youth.

    Fikiri Kiponda's path from accountant to marine (海洋的) conservationist was sparked by a chance encounter.    After securing his dream job, Kiponda decided he wanted more. He wasn't quite sure what he was looking for until he ran across some turtle hatchlings.

    He didn't know it was turtle. Fortunately enough he got the right person to ask and he got motivated. That person was Nkindi, a staff member at the Watamu Conservation project who later invited him to volunteer on the project. He later left his accounting job and fully devoted himself into the world of sea turtles. Now，he runs and spends his time nursing critically endangered sea turtles back to health.

    Sea turtles have been around for nearly 110 million years and are now considered highly endangered. Their preservation rests on activities of conservationists such as Kiponda as these turtles face numerous threats and signs of their extinction in the next 50 years.

    Local fishermen traditionally catch them to supplement their own low catch rates and sell them for their oil. As changes are made to accommodate more hotels for tourists, there is less available beach land for turtle nesting.

    Kiponda's passion has now spread to his community, changing their attitude towards sea life preservation with his “by-catch release programme.”

    Through this program, fishermen are now paid for returning turtles accidentally caught in their fishing nets. The healthy ones are tagged and released into the marine park while he takes care of sick and injured turtles back to health.

    Before the launch of pioneering spirit like this, turtles caught by fishermen were used for their meat and their oil extracted (提炼) for its medicinal properties.

    “Releasing the turtle back into the ocean is a very good feeling, like, you feel like you've done something concrete and I guess everybody would love to do that...so I guess it's unique work.”

    Once an Englishman named Jack Brown went to Russia for a holiday. He stayed there for several months and then came home again. Some of his friends visited him a few days after he got back. "I had a very dangerous trip while I was in Russia," Jack said to them. "I wanted to see a friend of mine in the country and the bad weather made me very late. So I was still traveling through a forest in a sleigh(雪橇) when the sun went down. It was a long way from my friend's house when about twenty wolves began to follow my sleigh. It was very dark in the forest. There was thick snow on the ground. It was cold, and there were no houses for miles and miles. First I heard the wolves. The noise was terrible! The horses heard them, too. They were frightened and began running faster. Then I saw long, gray forms among the trees, and soon the wolves were near us. They were running very fast, and they didn't seem to get tired like the horses."

    "What did you do?" one of Jack's friends asked.

    "When the wolves got very near," Jack answered, "I put up my gun and shot the first wolf. The sleigh was moving about, but I hit the animal and killed it. Then all the other wolves stopped and ate it, so our sleigh got away from them for a few minutes."

    "Then they finished their meal, and I heard them coming again. The moon was shining brightly on the snow now, and after a few minutes I saw them running among the trees once more. They came nearer again, and then I shot another of them, and the others stopped once more to eat it."

    "The same thing happened again and again, and my horses became more and more tired and ran slower and slower until, after about two hours, only one wolf was still alive and following us."

    "Wasn't it too fat to run?" one of his friends asked.

    In a career that lasted more than half a century, Tom Wolfe wrote fiction and nonfiction best-sellers including The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Bonfire of the Vanities. Along the way, he created a new type of journalism and coined phrases that became part of the American vocabulary.

    Wolfe began working as a newspaper reporter, first for The Washington Post, then the New York Herald Tribune. He developed a literary style in nonfiction that became known as the "New Journalism." "I've always agreed on a theoretical level that the techniques for fiction and nonfiction are interchangeable," he said. "The things that work in nonfiction would work in fiction, and vice versa."

    "When Tom Wolfe's voice broke into the world of nonfiction, it was a time when a lot of writers, and a lot of artists in general, were turning inwards," says Lev Grossman, book critic for Time magazine. "Wolfe didn't do that. Wolfe turned outwards. He was a guy who was interested in other people." Wolfe was interested in how they thought, how they did things and how the things they did affected the world around them.

    In 1979, Wolfe published The Right Stuff, an account of the military test pilots who became America's first astronauts. Four years later, the book was adapted as a feature film. "The Right Stuff was the book for me," says Grossman. "It reminded me, in case I'd forgotten, that the world is an incredible place."

    In The Right Stuff, Wolfe popularized the phrase "pushing the envelope." In a New York magazine article, Wolfe described the 1970s as "The 'Me' Decade." Grossman says these phrases became part of the American idiom because they were accurate.

    "He was an enormously forceful observer, and he was not afraid of making strong claims about what was happening in reality," Grossman says. "He did it well and people heard him. And they repeated what he said because he was right." All those words started a revolution in nonfiction that is still going on.

    Cropping (修剪) an Image With the Snap Shot Program

    Welcome to the world of photo-editing!

    Cropping an image allows you to zero in on (对准，聚焦) just the portion that is important to your project. For example, you may want to insert an image of a covered train in a report but may not want to include the whole train. Cropping the image allows you to select only the small area you wish to retain (保留) and eliminate all other portions of the original picture.

    Option 1: Cropping by Placing the Image in a Shape

    Screen Shot 1

    Using one of Snap Shot's standard shapes as a photo-editing tool requires no special abilities to crop an image with a standard shape:

    a. Click Cropping & Orientation from the Effects menu.

    b. Click to select one of the six shapes to frame your image.

    c. Use the mouse pointer to draw a frame around the portion of the image you wish to retain. Re-size the frame by dragging the shape's sizing handles. When you are satisfied with the results, click Cut It.

    d. Snap Shot will automatically return to the project that is open. (You may also copy or cut the cropped image and paste it into another application.)

    Option 2: Freehand Cropping of an Image

    Screen Shot 2

    If you want to trace the shape of an object in order to crop out everything else, freehand cropping is the way to go. To crop an image freehand:

    a. Click Freehand Crop from the Cropping & Orientation option on the Effects menu.

    b. Using the mouse pointer, trace around the shape you want to crop. Be sure to completely enclose the image by ending at the same place you began outlining.

    c. Click Cut It. Snap Shot will automatically return to the project that is open.

The American Psychological Association（APA） has issued its first advisory on social media use in adolescence（青春期）. What's most striking in its data based on recommendations is how little we really know about how these apps affect our kids.

The relative newness of platforms like Snapchat and Tik Tok means little research is available about their long-term effects on teen and tween brains. Getting better data will require significant funding—and much more openness from tech companies.

"What little evidence we do have unsurprisingly suggests that social media trades on motivators that aren't great for young brains. Many kids' first exposure to social media occurs at the worst possible time when it comes to brain development," says Mitch Prinstein, a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of North Carolina（UNC）.

"Things like 'button and artificial intelligence（in general）' are going to affect young people's brains in a way that's very different from adult brains when it comes to the desire to stay online and to say or do almost anything to get followers." When it comes to social interactions, he compares kids' brains to a car with a huge gas pedal and weak brakes（刹车）.

Earlier this year, Prinstein and his UNC colleagues published the results of one of the first studies of how the adolescent brain reacts to social media. The team surveyed a group of middle schoolers to understand their social media habits, and then stuck them in an MRI machine to watch their brains as they reacted to social rewards or punishments. They found that 12-year-olds who habitually checked social media had distinct neural patterns, with more activities over time in parts of the brain associated with motivation, salience（or where attention is focused） and cognitive control.

The team didn't weigh in on whether those differences were good or bad, or whether the relationship was causal or correlational. But their work points to the need for more research. It should also remind parents of the need to be keenly aware of social media's hidden influence on still-developing brains.