"Do you have any idea how hard it is to be a kid?"My 7-year-old daughter once asked me.My initial reaction to her complaint was eye-rolling,along with thinking,“Being a kid is hard?Are you kidding me?”as I mentally ticked off（用记号勾出）all the hard things that her mama does.

    However,as I thought about it a bit more,I realized how silly my reaction had been.Yes,as we adults look back on our childhood,being a kid seems carefree and easy and full of fun.Coloring at school!Playing games!Riding bikes! How could that be hard?So I asked my daughter why being a kid was so hard.

    Her first answer didn't surprise me."Well,because you don't have your own phone,and you can't eat in the living room."

    I asked if anything else was hard about being a kid."Someone else is the boss of you,"she replied.

    I thought some more.What else is hard about being a kid?Well,sometimes,we don't really take kids seriously.

    There are times when I've responded to my children's tears with "It's not that bad,"or"You don't need to be upset about that."Because I believe that a cancelled playdate or a lost toy is no big deal.But for little ones,it is.

    We don't intentionally ignore these opportunities for connection,but sometimes,in busy moments of parenting, we respond unskillfully.We don't take our children's view,and we miss an opportunity to practice compassion（同情心）.

    Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region is an important ecological screen for the north of China and even the whole country. Building a green great wall to ensure China's ecological security is one of the most important things of autonomous region.

The largest ecological function zone in the north of China, Inner Mongolia has a variety of landscapes, including forests, grasslands, wetlands, rivers and lakes. In recent years, the region's environment has improved, with its forest and grassland area having increased and desert reduced.

    However, it still faces a number of challenges in ecological preservation. For instance, the region faces severe water shortages with the number of lakes dropping from 427 in 1987 to 145 in 2010. In addition to a lack of rainfall, huge water consumption in agricultural and industrial production has worsened the water shortage. Too much use of fertilizers has damaged the soil and affected the growth of grass, accelerating the expansion of the desert, which results from a lack of water.

The local government encourages planting trees on grassland as they can get more pay for trees than by growing grass. However, the trees they plant often have a low survival rate as they have a high water consumption rate. Also, to treat wetlands, some areas have planted a large number of a single tree species. This practice may damage biodiversity (生物多样性) and endanger the survival of certain animals.

Experts suggest taking the region's water resources and weather conditions into consideration in future ecological projects.

    Trees are useful to man in three very important ways: they provide him wood and other products; they give him shade; and they help to prevent drought (干旱) and floods.

    Unfortunately, in many parts of the world, man has not realized that the third of these services is the most important. In his eagerness to draw quick profit from the trees, he has cut them down in large numbers.

    Two thousand years ago, a rich and powerful country cut down its trees to build warships, with which to gain itself an empire. It gained the empire but, without its trees, its soil became bare and poor. When the empire fell to pieces, the country found itself faced by floods and starvation.

    Even where a government realizes the importance of a plentiful supply of trees, it is difficult sometimes to make the people realize this. They cut down the trees but are too careless to plant and look after new trees. So unless the government has a good system of control, or can educate the people, the forests slowly disappear.

    This does not only mean that there will be fewer trees. The results are even more serious: for where there are trees, their roots break the soil up, allowing the rain to sink in, and also bind the soil. This prevents the soil from being washed away. But where there are no trees, the rainfalls on hard ground and flows away on the surface, and this causes floods and the rain carries away the rich top soil in which crops grow. When all the top soil is gone, nothing remains but worthless desert.

    The Intelligent Transport team at Newcastle University have turned an electric car into a mobile laboratory named "DriveLAB" in order to understand the challenges faced by older drivers and to discover where the key stress points are.

    Research shows that giving up driving is one of the key reasons for a fall in health and well-being among older people, leading to them becoming more isolated (隔绝) and inactive.

    Led by Professor Phil Blythe, the Newcastle team are developing in-vehicle technologies for older drivers which they hope could help them to continue driving into later life.

    These include custom-made navigation (导航) tools, night vision systems and intelligent speed adaptations. Phil Blythe explains: "For many older people, particularly those living alone or in the country, driving is important for preserving their independence, giving them the freedom to get out and about without having to rely on others.

    "But we all have to accept that as we get older our reactions slow down and this often results in people avoiding any potentially challenging driving conditions and losing confidence in their driving skills. The result is that people stop driving before they really need to."

    Dr Amy Guo, the leading researcher on the older driver study, explains:" The DriveLAB is helping us to understand what the key stress points and difficulties are for older drivers and how we might use technology to address these problems.

    "For example, most of us would expect older drivers always go slower than everyone else but surprisingly, we found that in 30mph zones they struggled to keep at a constant speed and so were more likely to break the speed limit and be at risk of getting fined. We're looking at the benefits of systems which control their speed as a way of preventing that.

    "We hope that our work will help with technological solutions (解决方案) to ensure that older drivers stay safer behind the wheel."

    Thirteen vehicles lined up last March to race across the Mojave Desert, seeking a million in prize money. To win, they had to finish the 142-mile race in less than 10 hours. Teams and watchers knew there might be no winner at all, because these vehicles were missing a key part－drivers.

    DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, organized the race as part of a push to develop robotic vehicles for future battlefields. But the Grand Challenge, as it was called, just proved how difficult it is to get a car to speed across an unfamiliar desert without human guidance. One had its brake lock up in the starting area. Another began by throwing itself onto a wall. Another got tied up by bushes near the road after 1.9 miles.

    One turned upside down. One took off in entirely the wrong direction and had to be disabled by remote control. One went a little more than a mile and rushed into a fence; another managed to go for six miles but stuck on a rock. The "winner," if there was any, reached 7.8 miles before it ran into a long, narrow hole, and the front wheels caught on fire.

    "You get a lot of respect for natural abilities of the living things," says Reinhold Behringer, who helped design two of the car-size vehicles for a company called Sci-Autonics. "Even ants (蚂蚁) can do all these tasks effortlessly. It's very hard for us to put these abilities into our machines."

    The robotic vehicles, though with necessary modern equipment such as advanced computers and GPS guidance, had trouble figuring out fast enough the blocks ahead that a two-year-old human recognizes immediately. Sure, that very young child, who has just only learned to walk, may not think to wipe apple juice off her face, but she already knows that when there's a cookie in the kitchen she has to climb up the table, and that when she gets to the cookie it will taste good. She is more advanced, even months old, than any machine humans have designed.

Do you know that junk food isn't healthy? Of course you do! Do you eat it anyway? Of course you do! But a new study shows teaching adolescents about the ways food companies fool them into thinking junk food is cool can encourage kids to fight back—by eating healthier.

The pull of junk food can be super-strong. It's designed to be tasty, which makes eating well one of the great health challenges of our time. Everyone from doctors to the government has been trying to handle it. Yet we keep eating junk food.

Professor Christopher Bryan says, "Food companies want you to want junk food." They spend millions of dollars coming up with new ways to promote junk food consumption. They hire scientists to make new junk food almost irresistible. They might do this, for example, by adding more sugar. Rats fed junk food for six weeks will even walk across a floor that gives them electric shocks just to get more of such food.

Food ads often make unhealthy junk food seem healthy by featuring professional athletes, fit-looking pop stars and smiling, active teens. "We thought when the students learned this, it would matter to them," Bryan says. He worked with 8th graders at a Texas school. Half of them got a lesson Bryan created. It focused on the ways junk food is advertised, or marketed. A second group received lessons that focused on health. These lessons informed students junk food is bad, and that foods like apples or carrots are a better choice. The students learned a bad diet can lead to major weight gain, and that being overweight puts people at risk for serious diseases. They also learned how eating well now can keep you healthy when you're older.

After the lessons, the kids in both groups were asked how they felt about junk food. Most didn't have positive feelings about these unhealthy foods.