It does not have to be January 1^st to give yourself a chance to make the most out of your day. Every day is a new day and a fresh start to learn, grow, develop your strengths, free yourself from past regrets or hurts, and move forward older and wiser. Every day gives you chance to reinvent yourself. It is never too late to change things that are not working in your life.

    Each day is a new beginning and a piece of blank paper. How would you like to create your day? If you wake up in a negative mind, you are more likely to paint a dark picture throughout the day, and your picture will not show hope, happiness and joy.

    If you take each day to think actively, and have a positive intention for how you would like to create your day, how would your life different? What can daily positive intentions do for you? Every day you will give yourself the gift of an “attitude of gratitude”.

    Each day is a chance to look at things in a different way. You can experience each day in the beauty of the world—and the beauty of you who is in it! You find yourself changing from “I can't” to “I can”. With a focus on positive intentions, you feel you are full of power and more like a “winner” than a “loser”.

    You pay more attention to the present, and will be more likely to live fully in the present each moment of each day. After all, the past is a great place to visit, but you don't want to live there! So how about starting each day taking a moment to think of a positive intention for the day?

    Imagine a mass of floating waste is two times the size of the state of Texas. Texas has a land area of more than 678,000 square kilometers. So it might be difficult to imagine anything twice as big. All together, this mass of waste flowing in the North Pacific Ocean is known as the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch（太平洋垃圾带）. It weighs about 3,500,000 tons. The waste includes bags, bottles and containers-plastic products of all kinds.

    The eastern part of the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch is about 1,600 kilometers west of California. The western part is west of the Hawaiian Islands and east of Japan. The area has been described as a kind of oceanic desert, with light winds and slow moving water currents（流，流动）. The water moves so slow that garbage from all over the world collects there.

    In recent years, there have been growing concerns about the floating garbage and its effect on sea creatures and human health. Scientists say thousands of animals get trapped in the floating waste, resulting in death or injury. Even more die from a lack of food or water after swallowing pieces of plastic. The trash can also make animals feel full, diminishing their desire to eat or drink.

    The floating garbage also can have harmful effects on people. There is an increased threat of infection（感染）of disease from polluted waste, and from eating fish that swallowed waste. Divers can also get trapped in the plastic.

    Its existence first gained public attention in 1997. That was when racing boat captain and oceanographer Charles Moore and his crew sailed into the garbage while returning from a racing event. Five years earlier, another oceanographer learnt of the trash after a shipment of rubber duckies got lost at sea. Many of those toys are now part of the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch.

    In August,2017, a team from the University of California, San Diego became the latest group to travel to it. They were shocked by the amount of waste they saw. They gathered hundreds of sea creatures and water samples to measure the garbage patch's effect on ocean environment.

    Driving a car is not just handling controls and judging speed and distance. It requires you to predict what other road users will do and get ready to react to something unexpected. When alcohol is consumed, it enters your bloodstream and acts as a depressant (抑制药),damaging eyesight, judgment and co­ordination(协调),slowing down reaction time and greatly increasing the risk of accidents. Even below the drink driving limit, driving will be affected.

    Alcohol may take a few minutes to be absorbed into the bloodstream and start action on the brain. Absorption rate is increased when drinking on an empty stomach or when consuming drinks mixed with fruit juice. To get rid of alcohol from the body is a very slow process and it is not possible to speed it up with any measures like taking a shower or having a cup of tea or coffee.

    The present Road Traffic Ordinance states clearly that the limit of alcohol concentration is： 50 milligrams of alcohol per 100 ml of blood； or 22 micrograms of alcohol per 100 ml of breath; or 67 milligrams of alcohol per 100 ml of urine (尿液)．

    Drivers who cause traffic accidents, or who commit a moving traffic offence or are being suspected of drink driving will be tested.

    Any driver found drinking beyond the limit will be charged. The driver declared guilty may be fined a maximum of HK $ 25000 and be sentenced to up to 3 years in prison and punished for 10 driving­offence points; or temporarily banned from driving.

    The same punishment applies to failing to provide specimens (样本)for breath, blood or urine tests without good excuse.

    Drink driving is a criminal offence. Be a responsible driver, think before you drink. For the safety of yourself and other road users, never drive after consuming alcohol.

    A study showed that the experiences children have in their first few years are important. These experiences affect the development of the brain. When children receive more attention, they often have higher IQs. Babies receive information when they see, hear and feel things, which makes connections between different parts of the brain. There are a hundred trillion (万亿) connections in the brain of a three-year-old child.

    Researcher Judit Gervain tested how good newborns are at distinguishing different sound patterns. Her researchers produced images of the brains of babies as they heard different sound patterns. For example, one order was mu-ba-ba. This is the pattern "A-B-B". Another order was mu-ba-ge. This is the pattern "A-B-C". The images showed that the part of the brain responsible for speech was more active during the "A-B-B" pattern. This shows that babies can tell the difference between different patterns. They also were sensitive to where it occurred in the order.

    Gervain is excited by these findings because the order of sounds is the building block of words and grammar. "Position is key to language," she says. "If something is at the beginning or at the end, it makes a big difference: 'John caught the bear.' is very different from 'The bear caught John.' "

    Researchers led by scientist Patricia Kuhl have found that language delivered by televisions, audio books, the Internet, or smartphones－no matter how educational－doesn't appear to be enough for children's brain development. They carried out a study of nine-month-old American babies. They expected the first group who'd watched videos in Chinese to show the same kind of learning as the second group who were brought face-to-face with the same sounds. Instead they found a huge difference. The babies in the second group were able to distinguish between similar Chinese sounds as well as native listeners. But the other babies－regardless of whether they had watched the video or listened to the audio－learned nothing.

    Your next Saturday night takeaway could be brought to you by a robot after a major food delivery company announced plans to use automated vehicles to transport meals. Europe's biggest online takeaway food company Just Eat has partnered with Starship Technologies to deliver food with robots on the streets of London later this month. "Nobody has ever done deliveries with land-based robots," said Allan Martinson, the chief operating officer of Starship.

    The robot courier can travel up to 4 miles per hour for about 10 miles. It uses a GPS signal and nine cameras to navigate (确定方向). Instead of a person arriving at their door, customers could find themselves receiving a notification on their phone that says a robot is on its way and a code to unlock the automated courier. "Put the code in, the robot opens up, and there's your food," said David Buttress, chief manager of Just Eat.

    The robot, which has so far been tested in Greenwich, Milton Keynes and Glastonbury, costs £ 1 to transport within 3 miles, compared with the £3 to £6 it costs for a human courier. To date 30 robots have driven nearly 5,000 miles without getting into an accident or finding themselves picked on by passers-by. They have driven in more than 40 cities around the world, including London and Tallinn, Estonia.

    An initial worry was how the public would react to robots. But Martinson said the public has been calm when passing the delivery machine on the streets. "The most surprising reaction has been the lack of reaction," said Martinson.

    Another significant fear was that people would disrupt (扰乱) the robots, or try to steal them and their contents. To prevent this, the robot is fitted with nine cameras, two way audio, and movement sensors that send a warning if it is lifted off the ground. And it opens only with a passcode provided to the customer via a notification. "It's much easier to shoplift than it is to steal a robot," said Martinson.

    Today the Nobel Prize in Literature awarded journalist Svetlana Alexievich approximately $970,000 in recognition of a lifetime of excellence. The 67-year-old author of Voices From Chernobyl and War's Unwomanly Face was praised by the Swedish Academy "for her polyphonic(复调式的) writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time."

    Prizes like the Nobel inspire much expectations before the announcement. People give their best guesses as to who will win, look back on past winners, and even place bets as if spectators at a Derby(赛马会).

    Literary prizes reward artistic brilliance. They help writers earn a decent living. But is the public's fascination with prize-winning authors healthy? Our impulse seems to increasingly contribute to a culture of turning authors into celebrities, where readers follow the author instead of the book.

    A story should stand on its own, as a considered, complete book, without biographical information from author. It's an idea perhaps best conveyed in Roland Barthes's 1968 essay The Death of the Author. "The image of literature to be found in contemporary culture is arbitrarily centered on the author, his person, his history, his tastes, his passions."

    Nearly 50 years later, a few still agree. "I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors," New York Times bestselling author Elena Ferrante once wrote. "If books have something to say, they will sooner or later find readers; if not, they won't, "she continued. "True miracles are the ones whose makers will never be known."

    ①But the rules for submission for the Man Booker International Prize, for example, strongly encourage authors to "make themselves available for publicity". And the foundation behind the National Book Award requires finalists to participate in their "website-related publicity".

    ② In 2007, a reporter who showed up uninvited at Doris Lessing's house was the first to inform her that she had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Today the Twitterati came knocking on Alexievich's digital door hour before the award was even official. To be considered for a prize is to be a public figure.

    ③ Harry Potter series author J. K. Rowling, with over 5.6 million Twitter followers, has actively addressed readers through public appearances and social media, revealing much more than we could have imagined when we closed the final Harry Potter book. We now know the house Harry's children will be sorted into, that Dumbledore is gay," Voldemort" is actually pronounced with a silent "t", and a whole host of the other minor and major details about the backstory of the characters.

    The magical world Rowling created in her books—a relatively tight mystery with well-laid clues that led to a satisfying conclusion, which had to prove their merits to the reader based on an internal logic—is being unraveled by her own hand.

    ④ Of course, public attention also has very important benefits for authors. For three months after receiving the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in fiction, Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad sold about triple its print sales from before the prize, Publishers Weekly reports. On Oct. 5, 2010, in the first FT/Oppenheimer Funds Emerging Voices Awards, as Nigerian-born Chigozie Obioma accepted the prize for fiction with an easy smile, his excitement was appreciable. Given the cash prize of $40,000 for each winner, it's hard to downplay the importance of such an honor. Such awards bring necessary visibility and funding to writers facing a literary landscape dominated by white men.

    But our culture of celebrity is often too wrapped up in the way we read: How might the meaning of a work change if the author really didn't grow up in a poor neighborhood, or if he or she was abused in childhood? Readers studied the author's life as if it were the key to interpreting his or her novels.

    Behind our fascination is the question that drives all such questions: What did the author intend? By all means, let us praise brilliant work and in doing so trust that the author has already told us enough, and that the story he or she meant to tell ended with the final page.