I look in the mirror, and I'm not happy with what I see. I don't have a "perfect" face. I look in the magazines and all I see are girls with fair hair, blue eyes, and, of course, a pretty little nose. They're on the outside of the buses that I take home, the television programs I watch, and the billboards（广告牌） I walk under. Almost every advertisement I see shows this human physical "perfection". These billboards not only tell me what to drink, but also how to look.

    Our society place more importance on a person's physical beauty, rather than their ability, honesty and character. We have influenced women to go through painful surgeries（手术）and starve themselves to become this society built physical model. To be a beautiful woman in the 21st century doesn't mean that you are a brilliant doctor or caring mother. It means you have the perfect jaw, eyes and lips. It means that you can be six feet tall and weigh one hundred and ten pounds.

But what about the women who are starting to leave their youth? Instead of looking at aging as a sign of wisdom, we try to prevent the aging process(过程）. It's a kind of funny thing to want to look eighteen when fifty. Fifty is a relaxed age, when you can step back and look at all you've achieved (successfully complete something). It is when your hard work pays off. Unfortunately, our society just sees you as "old". To stop the aging process, women buy wrinkle（皱纹） creams, do eye lifts and face lifts. They spend thousands of dollars to win the hopeless battle against age.

    I remember when I was about thirteen years old and going through teens, I had oily hair, and a half developed body. I hated the way I looked. I used to cry to my mother all the time, but she would just laugh and tell me that "you don't want anyone to like your appearance. It's your heart that is important, because beauty fades.（消逝）" I knew that she was right. If you work on your heart enough, people will start to see the beauty in you, which lasts and remains on even after you die.

    Those who are used to looking through thousands of books in big bookstores may find Japan's Morioka Shoten a little strange. That's because this tiny bookstore that is located in Ginza, Tokyo sells only a single book at a time.

    Opened in May 2015, Morioka Shoten is the brainchild of Yoshiyuki Morioka. The experienced bookseller began his career as a bookstore clerk in Tokyo's Kanda district before branching out to open his own store. It was here while organizing book readings that he realized that customers usually came into the store with one title in mind. Morioka began to wonder if a store could exist by selling many copies of just one single book. In November 2014, he partnered with his two friends, to establish a unique bookstore with the idea of “A Single Room, A Single Book.”

    Like its offering, the bookstore is simple. The selections that are picked by Morioka change weekly and vary widely to attract customers with different interests. Recent choices include The True Deceiver, an award-winning Swedish novel by Tove Jansson, Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales, and a collection of artist Karl Blossfeldt's photography of plants. Morioka has also chosen books written by famous Japanese authors Mimei Ogawa and Akito Akagi.

    To highlight his only offering, Morioka often uses clever methods. For example，when selling a book about flowers, he decorated his shop with the ones that had been mentioned in the book. He also encourages authors to hold talks and discussions so they can connect with customers. Morioka says his goal is for the customers to experience being inside a book, not just a bookstore!

    Risky as the idea might seem, things appear to be going well. Morioka says he has sold over 2,100 books since he opened it. Things can get better considering that (考虑到) his bookstore is becoming increasingly popular not just among the locals but also visitors from other countries.

    Amy Maplethorpe, a first-year speech-language teacher at Raymond Ellis Primary School, used tennis balls, a hot glue gun, Mod Podge and a bit of paint to create two chairs that help students with sensory (感官的) problems.

    According to the school's Facebook page, which became very popular, the chairs provide a “different texture (质地) to improve sensory regulation (调控).”

    Maplethorpe told ABC News that the chairs will service about 15 to 20 students. Children with sensory problems often have a hard time “dealing with sensory information”. Things, such as coats, blankets and Maplethorpe's chairs, often comfort a student.

    Maplethorpe was excited to create the chair after seeing something similar on a website, and she made some changes to the idea.

    “I wanted to continue to help students with sensory problems at Ellis and provide a different kind of seat for the students,” she continued. “I was excited that this chair could help my students.''

    The two chairs are now in the school's sensory room, which was created recently, according to headmaster, Beth Kiewicz.

    “When a child's sensory needs are met, we then can move on to their needs in study,” Kiewicz, who has led the school for six years, told ABC News.

    Maplethorpe said the chairs have already made a difference for some of her students.

    “Students have become more patient, and have followed directions, while waiting for activities,” she said.

    When my sister Mertie told me she had put out tomato plants last summer, I was quite impressed.

    Since she was a garden-beginner, Mertie researched exactly how far apart to space her tomato plants; what kind of fertilizer to use; how to keep away the bugs（害虫）, etc. Once they were planted, she took care of them daily, anxiously awaiting the juicy tomatoes to appear. But, day after day, her plants were tomato-less while all of her neighbors who had also put out tomato plants were already enjoying the fruit of their labor.

    Frustrated (upset), Mertie gave in and went to the market to search fresh tomatoes. While paying, Mertie told the farmer her troubles. The farmer paused to think for a moment and then asked, "Well, what kind of tomatoes did you plant?"

    "I think they were called Big Boy," Mertie remembered.

    "Well there's your problem," the farmer explained. "Big Boy and Better Boy tomatoes have a 95-day growing period whereas regular tomato plants produce fruit in as few as 70 days…you just have to wait a little longer for the Big Boys."

    With that new knowledge, Mertie went home with excitement, knowing they would be worth the wait.

    Thinking about my sister's gardening experience, I had to smile. She just didn't know that Big Boy tomatoes took longer--neither did I--but once she discovered that information, she was no longer discouraged and upset about the lack of tomatoes on her plants. Instead, she was encouraged and excited to see them a few weeks later.

    It makes me wonder how many of us have "Big Boy" dreams in our hearts, yet we just don't realize that they are of the "Big Boy" variety so we are discouraged and worn out with the waiting process. Instead of waiting with excitement, we give up on our dreams and figure we must have done something wrong to stop them from coming to pass. Frustrated, we see other people's dreams coming true, and we wonder why ours haven't yet been achieved.

    The famous director of a big and expensive movie planned to film a beautiful sunset over the ocean, so that the audiences could see his hero and heroine in front of it at the end of the film as they said goodbye to each other forever. He sent his camera crew out one evening to film the sunset for him.

    The next morning he said to the men, "Have you provided me with that sunset?"

    "No, sir," the men answered.

    The director was angry. "Why not?" he asked.

    "Well, sir," one of the men answered, "we're on the east coast here, and the sun sets in the west. We can get you a sunrise over the sea, if necessary, but not a sunset."

    "But I want a sunset!" the director shouted. "Go to the airport, take the next flight to the west coast, and get one."

    But then a young secretary had an idea. "Why don't you photograph a sunrise," she suggested, "and then play it backwards? Then it'll look like a sunset."

    "That's a very good idea!" the director said. Then he turned to the camera crew and said, "Tomorrow morning I want you to get me a beautiful sunrise over the sea."

    The camera crew went out early the next morning and filmed a bright sunrise over the beach in the middle of a beautiful bay. Then at nine o'clock they took it to the director. "Here it is, sir," they said, and gave it to him. He was very pleased.

    They all went into the studio. "All right," the director explained, "now our hero and heroine are going to say goodbye. Run the film backwards so that we can see the 'sunset' behind them."

    The "sunset" began, but after a quarter of a minute, the director suddenly put his face in his hands and shouted to the camera crew to stop.

    The birds in the film were flying backwards, and the waves on the sea were going away from the beach.

D

With the completion of the Human Genome（基因组）Project more than 20 years ago, and the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA enjoying its 70th birthday last year, you might assume that we know how life works. Think again!

Evolution has a 4bn-year head start on us. However, several aspects of the standard picture of how life works-the idea of the genome as a blueprint, of genes as instructions for building an organism, of proteins as precisely tailored molecular（分子）machines and more-have wildly reduced the complexity of life. 

In the excellent book How Life Works, Philip Ball explorers the new biology, revealing life to be a far richer, more delicate affair than we have understood. Ball explains that life is a system of many levels-genes, proteins, cells, tissues, and body modules-each with its own rules and principles, so there is no unique place to look for an answer to it. 

Also, How Life Works is a much more appealing title than the overused question of "What is life?". We should be less concerned with what a thing is, and rather more focused on what a thing does. Defining a living thing implies an unchangeable ideal type, but this will run counter to the Darwinian principle that living things are four-dimensional, ever changing in time as well as space.

But it's an idea that is deeply rooted within our culture. Ball points out that we rely on metaphors（比喻）to explain and explore the complexities of life, but none suffice. We are taught that cells are machines, though no machine we have invented behaves like the simplest cell; that DNA is a code or a blueprint, though it is neither; that the brain is a computer, though no computer behaves like a brain at all.

Ball is a terrific writer, pumping out books on incredibly diverse subjects. There's a wealth of well-researched information in here, and some details that are a bit chewy for the lay reader. But the book serves as an essential introduction on our never-ending quest to understand life.