When Regina Spektor moved to the Bronx from Russia as a young child of 9, she could speak no English and her family was so poor that they could afford nothing. Yet she carried with her a love of the piano and music.

     "For me, the thing that I loved the most was playing the piano, so when we left Russia I was so afraid I would forget how to play and I would just find a little table and play my pieces," she told "When you spend your life doing something like playing the piano and then you take that away, it's so surreal."(离奇的)

     Her father, Ilya Spektor, said that, little by little, the family saved enough money to afford their first apartment.

     "I was a photographer and, in six weeks, I found my first job in a big photo lab in Manhattan," he said. On the subway one day, Ilya Spektor spotted a man carrying a violin case. The man also seemed to have an Eastern European accent. A conversation led to a visit and, eventually, Regina Spektor was introduced to Sonia Vargas, a piano teacher. She was a well-known professor who taught piano, took Spektor under her wing and trained her for years, at no cost. "I remember talking to Sonia," Spektor said. "She said that when a student is ready, a teacher appears. So she said that I must have been ready to study piano, and so that's why she came into my life."

     "Immediately, how she played," Vargas said. "You can tell the sound. The sound tell you whether the person loves the instrument, loves the music."

     Much later, while playing her own music and selling a CD that she'd created, Regina Spektor caught the attention of a music producer. The rest is history, complete with concerts around the world and performance in front of the Obamas at the White House.

Regina Spektor greatly appreciated her parents, piano teachers and friends for helping her become the musician she is. “I love the idea that if you're walking toward the world, the world will take some steps towards you,” she said.

    We could say that any animal that knows how to find food, avoid being eaten, and raise babies is pretty smart. But can animals learn and remember or can they solve problems?

Many animals have good memories for where food is — a useful skim Scrub jays (灌丛鸦) may be the champions. In one experiment, scientists put them in pre-made holes. After the jays had hidden some food, they were taken out. Scientists mapped where the food was hidd6n and then remove ii, which meant the jays couldn't find the holes by smell. But when the jays came back again, they went right to the hiding they had used. In the wild, they remember where thousands of holes arc. Could you do that?

    Another important smart skill is being able to spot shapes and generalize. This kind of test work best with animals that see well and are interested in pictures. Call in the pigeons(鸽子)! In this test, pigeons had to learn to pick out photos with trees in them, and to ignore photos that didn't include any trees. Once they had learned the rules, they were very adept at it.

    Scientists have to be careful when they test animals for smarts, and the person giving the test has to know the animal really well, in one experiment, a few bananas were hung out of reach over a p on the ground. Monkeys figured out right away how to get the bananas: pick up a stick and knocked down. But clever elephants kept failing this test. Finally scientists figure out why. An elephant's trunk work as both its hand and its nose. When it got the stick, it couldn't smell the bananas. When the elephants were given a couple of boxes instead, they quickly use them to make a step and got the bananas.

    As we're learning, the world is full of smart animals, each thinking in its own special way.

    It all started in 2013, when Shea Stollenwerk, then eight years old, asked for a new hand for Christmas. Shea was born with a partial right hand, which restricts her ability to do things that other kids take for granted.

    “My mom went online”, says Shea, who lives in Muknowango, Wisconsin. Shea's mother, Ranee, soon learned about a community of artists, designers, and scientists who are making big breakthrough with artificial hands.

    Frankie Flood, a professor at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, was among the designers who saw Ranee's online request. Flood obtained help from fellow professor Adeam Blair and their students, who were learning how to make designs using a 3-D printer. “We made a mold(模子) of Shea's hand out of plaster(石膏), and then we 3-D scanned her hand,” Flood says.

    While being fitted in Flood's laboratory, Shea got to choose the color of her new hand. She went with bright pink. She now has a pink hand, a purple hand, and a purple and pink one, and can do things that she couldn't do before, like peeling potatoes, picking up objects, and catching a ball.

    Flood and his team have since built hands for six other local children. Indirectly, they have helped dozens more by posting their designs online so that people around the world can print them out. Flood is also working on artificial legs for military soldiers who were injured on the battlefield. “Without a covering, the artificial leg is kind of ugly and plain,” Flood says. “Soldiers want something that will restore the shape of their legs and make them look cooler when they're playing sports.”

    As for Shea, the aspiring musician can now play her violin with the help from an adaptive device that Flood's team created. “Nothing is ever going to hold her back,” Shea's father, Steve, told a local reporter.

    A man had a dream in which he was told where he could find fantastic wealth in a remote place. When he awoke, he immediately set off to find it. After a long journey full of danger and hardship, he arrived at the place in his dream. A local man who had heard about the dreamer's purpose laughed loud and long, saying that he had dreamed three times about a house where great treasure was buried under a fountain. It made the dreamer realize that the place the local was describing was his very own yard. He returned home and found the treasure.

    Like the man in this tale, the Chinese movie industry has been on a long journey to find its place in the world. In 1994, “The Fugitive” became the first major Hollywood film to be shown in the country in decades. Audiences were attracted by the movie's fast pace and sound effects, and it proved to be a great success. Since then, the Chinese film industry has balanced a complex (复杂的) relationship with Hollywood.

    Although there has been a sharp slowdown in China's box-office numbers—movie-ticket revenue rose just 3.7 percent in 2017 after growing by an average of 35 percent per year from 2011 to 2016~the country still has a huge movie market, with theaters continuing to expand into more rural areas and audiences proving that they have a strong desire for Hollywood action films. So much so that recently, Hollywood has even started to make movies with China in mind, casting Chinese movie stars with great box-office power and changing the plots of films to win over Chinese moviegoers.

    Many in China's film industry, from young scriptwriters (编剧) to senior critics, know Hollywood's dramatic structure all too well and support its styles. And many American offerings introduced in the Chinese market, regardless of quality, continue to do well among Chinese audiences, especially with young people, whose tastes and viewing habits have been shaped by Hollywood movies and TV shows. Like audiences in other developing countries, those in China tend to have a worldview filtered (过滤) by and focused on the United States, even though the United States doesn't mean the whole world and Hollywood isn't the world's only movie industry.

    Like an ocean that refuses no rivers, China's movie industry will continue to influence and allow itself to be influenced by its international counterparts (对应的人或物). China needs the United States, and the United States needs China. But at the moment, a large difference exists in that very few Chinese movies are able to enter the American market and attract a significant audience. Chinese audiences provide Hollywood with huge profits, but what does China's film industry gain in return?

    Google, one of the world's outstanding tech companies, was attacked. It wasn't its search engine that was attacked or its advertising platform or even its social network. Google⁺. Instead, it was a building.

    Two web security experts hacked (侵入) into its Wharf 7 office in Sydney, Australia, through Google's building management system (BMS). One of them, Billy Rios, says, “My colleague and I have lot of experience in web security, but it is not something that people couldn't learn. Once you understand how the system works, it is very simple.

    They found the system on Shodan, a search engine that lists devices connected to the Internet, and then ran it through their own software to identify who owned the building. In the case of the Google hacking, the researchers had no immoral purpose and just informed Google about what they found.

    According to Mr Rios, who runs security company Whitescope, there are 50, 000 buildings currently connected to the Internet, including research institutes, churches and hospitals, and 2, 000 of those are online with password protection, Martyn Thomas, a professor of IT at Gresham College in the UK, says, “It is beyond doubt that attempts to attack building management systems are happening all the time.”

    Making a building smart generally means connecting the systems that control heating, lighting and security to the Internet and the wider corporate network. There was a strong reason for doing this, said Andrew Kelly, principal security consultant at defence company Qinetiq.

    “Energy savings are the biggest factor in connecting building management systems to the corporate network,” he says. “It gives those who run the building better control and offers between 20% to 50% in energy savings,” he adds.

    But it also makes them less secure. And if any of these feels like a Hollywood filmy, think again.

Discover Nature Schools Programmer

    Becoming Bears (Kindergarten—2 grade)

    By becoming baby bears, children learn from their "parent" to survive the seasons. Kids will find safety in the spring and learn kinds of food bears eat during the summer, and then create a cave for winter hibernation (冬眠). After learning the skills needed to survive, students will go out of the cave as an independent black bear able to care for themselves.(1.5—2 hours)

    Whose Clues? (3—5 grade)

    Kids will discover how plants and animals use their special structures to survive. Through outdoor study of plants and animals, kids will recognise their special structures and learn how they enable species to eat, avoid their enemies and survive. Using what they have learnt, kids will choose one species and tell how they survive in their living places.(3—4 hours)

    Winged Wonders (3—5 grade)

    Birds add colour and sound to our world and play an important ecological (生态的) role. Students will learn the basics of birds, understand the role birds play in food chains and go bird watching using field guides and telescopes. Students will do hands－on activities. Students will use tools to build bird feeders, allowing them to attract birds at home.(3—4 hours)

    Exploring Your Watershed (6—8 grade)

    We all depend on clean water. Examining how our actions shape the waterways around us. Go on a hike to see some of the first－hand challenging water quality problems in a city. Students will test the water quality to determine the health of an ecosystem.

    Each programme is taught for a class with at least 10 students.

    All programmes include plenty of time outdoor. So please prepare proper clothing, sunscreen and insect killers for children.

    To take part in a programme, please e－mail dcprogrammes@mdc.mo.gov.