Christian Eijkman, a Dutch doctor, left the Netherlands for the island of Java. Many people on the island had a disease called beri-beri. He was going there to try and find a cure.

    At first, Eijkman thought some kind of germ (细菌) caused beri-beri. He raised some chickens. He didn't eat them, but made experiments on them. The local people were quite surprised at that. One day he noticed that his chickens became sick when they were fed the food most Javanese ate — refined white rice (精炼米). When he fed them with unrefined rice, also known as brown rice, they recovered. Eijkman realized that he had made an important discovery — that some things in food could prevent disease. These things were named vitamins. The Javanese were not getting enough vitamins because they had actually removed the part that contains vitamins. Later, other diseases were also found to be caused by the lack of vitamins in a person's food.

    Today many people know the importance of vitamins and they make sure they have enough vitamins from the food they eat. If they don't, they can also take vitamin pills.

    It seems that no one can live a happy life without friendship. While a great number of people expect others to be their friends, they don't give friendship back. That is why some friendships don't last long. To have a friend, you must learn to be one. You must learn to treat your friend the way you want your friend to treat you. Learning to be a good friend means learning three rules: be honest; be generous; be understanding.

    Honesty is where a good friendship starts. Friends must be able to trust one another. If you do not tell the truth, people usually find out. If a friend finds out that you haven't been honest, you may lose your friend's trust. Good friends always depend on one another to speak and act honestly.

    Generosity means sharing and sharing makes a friendship grow. You do not have to give your lunch money or your clothes. Naturally you will want to share your ideas and feelings. These can be very valuable to a friend. They tell your friend what is important to you. By sharing them, you help your friend know better.

    Sooner or later everyone needs understanding and help with each other. Something may go wrong at school. Talking about the problem can make it easier to solve. Turning to a friend can be a first step in solving the problem. So to be a friend you must listen and understand. You must try to put yourself in your friend's place so that you can understand the problem better.

    No two friendships are exactly alike. But all true friendships have three things in common. If you plan to keep your friends, you must practice honesty, generosity and understanding.

    It was the men's figure skating final of the Winter Olympics when I was 16.I lay on our living room floor excitedly watching the battle between the Brains: American Brain Boitano facing Brian Orser in Canada. Both of them had been world champions. Both of them deserved to win. As a Northern Californian, I was for my fellow countryman. He also grew up in Northern California. We'd skated on the same ice. Brain performed successfully. The champion! I jumped in the air when his score went up.

    But what happened next is what I'll never forget. Brain sat in front of the camera, surrounded by a group of journalists. Brain was talking about his career and his medal, talking to the whole world. A terrible sinking feeling went through me. I could never be in the Olympics,

    I thought, I loved skating because I could express myself with my jumps and dances better than words.

    What if journalists asked me questions like they asked Brain? I'd freeze up like the ice beneath my skates! And yet, there was so much I would love to say, about my family and all the support they'd given me and about following my dream of being a skating champion.

    I worked very hard the next few years — on the ice and especially off. After journalists talked to me and although my heart pounded every time I spoke to them, I got to know them. And they got to know me. Slowly I learned that the best approach was simply to be myself, to be honest and gracious and do my best, just like on the ice, to answer their questions.

    So when my big moment came four years after Brain's, I was ready. Remember: when you do the thing you fear most, you put an end to fear.

    At the end of August this year I moved from London, UK, to a small town in Quebec, Canada, called Matane to work as an English language assistant. Patience is a word that has appeared in many forms over the past two months.

    I don't see myself as being the most patient person in the world but there was something that struck me on my first week of work. I had just finished a session with two students and just as they were leaving the classroom, one of the students turned back and said, “Thank you for your patience.” That was an early reminder of the importance of being patient as a teacher. It also made me reflect on the language teachers that I have had over the years, ones that demonstrated a high level of patience and understanding that has shaped my language learning path. Moreover, it helped me to realize the importance of demonstrating patience in the classroom as it can be the difference between building someone's confidence in a language or breaking down their confidence entirely.

    Living my life constantly in French is not easy but the people of Quebec are very patient. They repeat things several times and they are more than happy to wait while I find the correct words to express myself and find the correct word order. It's a learning process but with the patience of others, the process is slightly less nervous. At the end of the day, making mistakes shows you are trying and I think that is greatly appreciated by Quebecers.

    When I first arrived in Matane I kept getting headaches from having to concentrate all the time due to the language and even overhearing other people's conversations was hard work! I had to keep reminding myself that it would take time, and two months later the headaches are a distant memory and my ears have become more tuned to their accent. The key is to be patient with yourself.

    In 2009 a new flu virus was discovered. Combining elements of the viruses that cause bird flu and swine flu, this new virus, named H1N1, spread quickly. Within weeks, public health agencies around the world feared a terrible pandemic (流行病) was under way. Some commentators warned of an outbreak on the scale of the 1918 Spanish flu. Worse, no vaccine(疫苗) was readily available. The only hope public health authorities had was to slow its spread. But to do that, they needed to know where it already was.

    In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) required that doctors inform them of new flu cases. Yet the picture of the pandemic that showed up was always a week or two out of date. People might feel sick for days but wait before consulting a doctor. Relaying the information back to the central organizations took time, and the CDC only figured out the numbers once a week. With a rapidly spreading disease, a two-week lag is an eternity. This delay completely blinded public health agencies at the most urgent moments.

    Few weeks before the H1N1 virus made headlines, engineers at the Internet giant Google published a paper in Nature. It got experts' attention but was overlooked. The authors explained how Google could "predict" the spread of the winter flu, not just nationally, but down to specific regions and even states. Since Google receives more than three billion search queries every day and saves them all, it had plenty of data to work with.

    Google took the 50 million most common search terms that Americans type and compared the list with CDC data on the spread of seasonal flu between 2003 and 2008. The idea was to identify areas affected by the flu virus by what people searched for on the Internet. Others had tried to do this with Internet search terms, but no one else had as much data-processing power, as Google.

    While the Googles guessed that the searches might be aimed at getting flu information—typing phrases like "medicine for cough and fever"—that wasn't the point: they didn't know, and they designed a system that didn't care. All their system did was look for correlations(相关性) between the frequency of certain search queries and the spread of the flu over time and space. In total, they processed 450 million different mathematical models in order to test the search terms, comparing their predictions against actual flu cases from the CDC in 2007 and 2008. And their software found a combination of 45 search terms that had a strong correlation between their prediction and the official figures nationwide. Like the CDC, they could tell where the flu had spread, but unlike the CDC they could tell it in near real time, not a week or two after the fact.

    Thus, when the H1N1 crisis struck in 2009, Google's system proved to be a more useful and timely indicator than government statistics with their natural reporting lags. Public health officials were armed with valuable information.

    Strikingly, Google's method is built on "big data"—the ability of society to handle information in new ways to produce useful insights or goods and services of significant value. However,   ▲  . For example, in 2012 it identified a sudden rise in flu cases, but overstated the amount, perhaps because of too much media attention about the flu. Yet what is clear is that the next time a pandemic comes around, the world will have a better tool to predict and thus prevent its spread.

    Peter Damon produces about 30 paintings a year and sells them for between US$250 and US$1,500. That's not enough to make ends meet, but it has made him whole again. He lost both arms in an accident.

    "Having this skill that even normal people find difficult was something that really helped me and made me feel like I fit in more in the world," Damon said.

    He was a worker in a car factory. One day when he was working, there was a gas explosion (爆炸), killing one worker and injuring him.

    "I lost my right arm above the elbow, about three inches above the elbow, and my left about six inches below," he explained.

    "How am I going to make a living and take care of my family? I had always worked with my hands," he said.

    Then with a simple little drawing, a new future opened up for him.

    "I thought it was wonderful in a way," Damon said. "Something was telling me to focus on this and everything will be alright." Damon doesn't have a perfect prosthetic arm (假肢)—just a hook (钩子), which he finds works best.

He and his wife Jen run True Grit Art Gallery in Middleboro, Massachusetts, where he shows the works of local artists. With his disability check from the government, he can afford to be an artist. He is a man doing what he wants with his life, and doesn't look at his situation as a hard time.

    "I don't see it that way," Damon said. "Suffering an injury like this has a way of making you focus on what's important in life."

    He believes his best work is still ahead of him. But with his pictures of simple American scenes, Damon has already produced his best work.