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   I work with Volunteers for Wildlife, a rescue and education organization at Bailey Arboretum in Locust Valley. Trying to help injured, displaced or sick creatures can be heartbreaking; survival is never certain. However, when it works, it is simply beautiful.

    I got a rescue call from a woman in Muttontown. She had found a young owl(猫头鹰) on the ground. When I arrived, I saw a 2-to 3-week-old owl. It had already been placed in a carrier for safety.

    I examined the chick(雏鸟) and it seemed fine. If I could locate the nest, I might have been able to put it back, but no luck. My next work was to construct a nest and anchor it in a tree.

    The homeowner was very helpful. A wire basket was found. I put some pine branches into the basket to make this nest safe and comfortable. I placed the chick in the nest, and it quickly calmed down.

    Now all that was needed were the parents, but they were absent. I gave the homeowner a recording of the hunger screams of owl chicks. These advertise the presence of chicks to adults; they might also encourage our chick to start calling as well. I gave the owner as much information as possible and headed home to see what news the night might bring.

    A nervous night to be sure,but sometimes the spirits of nature smile on us all! The homeowner called to say that the parents had responded to the recordings. I drove over and saw the chick in the nest looking healthy and active. And it was accompanied in the nest by the greatest sight of all — LUNCH！The parents had done their duty and would probably continue to do so.

    It is sad to learn that fewer of us now own pets. According to Mintel, just 56% of UK households（家庭）today include a pet, compared with 63% in 2012. It is down to our smaller homes. The housing crisis（危机）is taking away one of our life's joys: pets.

    Pets can help us get over serious illness. Pets lessen our anxiety. Pets can be a godsend for people experiencing various forms of mental disorders. As if all that were not enough, pets also help their owners get a date because of complex psychological reasons.

    There do, of course, remain oppositions to the very idea of pets. The charity PET A puts it thus: “This selfish desire to own animals and receive love from them causes immeasurable suffering, which results from selling or giving them away casually, and taking away their opportunity to enjoy their natural behavior.” This is undoubtedly true in some situations. But seen from a different point of view, there's something quite lovely about the story of people and their companion animals.

    What was once a relationship based only on the animal's functional effects—its ability to kill pests（害虫）, guard houses, and the like—has developed into something much more about care and love.

    We share 84% of our DNA with dogs. We share 90% of our DNA with mice, for good ness sake. I have no idea how that works. But still pets remind（提醒）us we're part something bigger. Pets break down the barriers between us and the animal kingdom. We may teach pets to roll over, stand up, order takeaways and so on. But they teach us much more: that life is actually really quite short and so should be filled as much as possible with life-giving experiences.

    The first person in the world to receive two facial transplants says he is feeling well, three months after his latest groundbreaking operation.

    Jerame Hamon had his first transplanted face removed last year after signs of rejection following a treatment with an antibiotic (抗生素) during a cold.

    The 43 year old remained in a hospital in Paris without a face for two months while a compatible donor was sought.

    He said: “The first face I accepted immediately. This time it's the same.”

    Mr. Hamon suffers from neurofibromatosis (多发性神经纤维瘤), a genetic condition that spoiled his face severely.

    His first transplant, in 2010, was a success, but he caught a common cold in 2015 and was given antibiotics. The drug was incompatible with the immunosuppressive (免疫制疫的) treatment he was having to prevent a rejection of the transplanted material.

    The first signs of rejection came in 2016 and last November, the face, suffering from the death of most of cells, had to be removed.

    Mr. Hamon lived without a face in a room at Georges-Pompidou hospital in Paris without being able to see, speak or hear until January, when a face donor was found and the second transplant carried out.

    To avoid further rejection, Mr. Hamon—dubbed “the man with three faces” by French media ―had special treatment to clean the blood prior to the transplant.

    His new face remains smooth and motionless, and his skull, skin and features are yet to be fully matched. But he is positive about his recovery.

    “If I hadn't accepted this new face it would have been terrible. It's a question of identity… But here we are, it's good, it's me,” he told AFP news agency from the hospital, where he is still recovering.

    The hours-long operation was led by Prof Laurent Lantieri, a specialist in hand and face transplants who carried out Mr. Hamon's initial surgery eight years ago.

    “Today, we know that a double transplant is practicable, it's no longer in the field of research,” he told Le Parisien newspaper.

    Anaesthetist Bernard Cholley said: “Anyone who loses their face and then has to wait for a possible and imagined transplant for an unknown length of time—that's something that nobody has ever had to go through here.”

    “I'm amazed by the courage of a patient who has been able to get through such a different experience.”

    The first face transplant was carried out in 2005 in northern France. Since then, some 40 operations have been performed around the world.

     Many of us feel uneasy when someone stands too close to us, talks to us too loudly or makes eye contact(接触) with us for too long. But have you ever wondered why those things make you uncomfortable?
      It's all about personal peace, which means not only an imaginary space around the body, but also the space around all the senses. People feel that their space is being violated(侵犯) when they meet with an unwelcome sound, smell or look. This is probably why a man on a crowded bus shouting into his mobile phone or a woman next to you putting on strong perfume(香水) makes you feel angry.

    Whether people have had a stronger wish to protect their personal space in recent times is hard to say. Yet studies of airlines show that people have a strong desire to have space to themselves. In a survey by Trip Advisor, a travel website, people said that if they had to pay more for some extra service, they would rather have larger seats than extra food.

    Although people may need their personal space, some hardly realize it. For example, people on a bus who hold newspapers in front of their faces to read in fact keep a distance from strangers.

    Go and watch a library table. You will notice that one of the corner seats will usually be taken first, because they are the farthest way. What if someone sits opposite to you? Maybe you will pile up books as if to make a wall.

    Preference for personal space is different from culture to culture. Scientists have found that Americans generally prefer more personal space than people from other cultures. In Latin cultures, however, people are more comfortable standing close to each other.

    Now women are free to enter any career that attracts them, and working can bring them pride, confidence and independence. Working women make up nearly half of the U.S. workforce, and 51 percent of professional workers, like doctors, lawyers, nurses and accountants, are female. While climbing the career ladder can be rewarding, it often comes with one big disadvantage: weight gain!

    New research published this week in the International Journal of Obesity shows that working women are more likely to be overweight, and the more you work, the more pounds you're likely to pile on. Like many women, I work... a lot! As a self-employed nutrition communications specialist, I sit at my desk, in front of a computer, for hours on end. Sitting alone is one of the worst things you can do for your health, and it's directly linked to being overweight and increased fatness, so the fact that women in the workforce gain weight isn't that surprising. If you work, you have less time to move around. Obesity researchers are revealing many other ways that employment is harmful to your diet and waistline(腰围).

    In the International Journal of Obesity study, some 9,276 Australian women aged 45-50 had their body weight and employment status monitored for two years. Results? Those who worked more than 35 hours were likely to gain weight compared to those who worked fewer hours or were out of the workforce. What's more, the more hours a woman worked in a week, the more weight she gained.

    The authors of the Australian study attribute weight gain among working women to inactivity, lack of time for food preparation, more use of prepared foods, high levels of stress, lack of sleep and consuming more alcohol. I'll also add in travel, meals eaten out and working at night as other factors that I can find to make balancing work with a healthy diet a challenge.

Three Japanese tourists taking a holiday in Australia got stuck when their GPS told them they could drive from the mainland to an island, failing to mention the 15 kilometres of water and mud in between.

As they drove their hired car from Moreton Bay to nearby North Stradbroke Island, they started to notice the firm surface they were driving on giving way to the well­known bay mud. However, being confident that their GPS would direct them to a road soon, they decided to drive on, managing to travel around 500 metres before their car was up to its tires in mud. To make matters worse, the tide (潮汐) started to come in and soon forced them to seek help and abandon the vehicle. Just four hours later the car was trapped in two metres of water—to the great amusement of onlookers on the shore and passengers on passing boats and ferries.

Yuzu Noda, 21, said she was listening to the GPS and "it told us we could drive down there. It kept saying it would navigate (导航) US to a road. But we got stuck… there's lots of mud". She and her travel companions Tomonari Saeki, 22, and Keita Osada, 21, instead had to give up their plans for a day trip to the island and headed back to the Gold Coast of a lift from the RACQ tow truck (吊车) driver who was called to the trapped car. No such luck for the hired car, though—after assessing the situation, no attempt was made to recover it. The students from Tokyo, who are due to return home tomorrow, said the experience would not put them off returning to Australia for another visit. Mr Tomonari said, "It has rained every day on our six day holiday. Hopefully next time we come back it will be sunny. "

The car was covered by insurance, but the tourists will have to pay up to about $1,500 in extra charges.