One day when I was 12, my mother gave me an order: I was to walk to the public library, and borrow at least one book for the summer. This was one more weapon for her to defeat my strange problem — inability to read.

    In the library, I found my way into the “Children's Room.” I sat down on the floor and pulled a few books off the shelf at random. The cover of a book caught my eye. It presented a picture of a beagle. I had recently had a beagle, the first and only animal companion I ever had as a child. He was my secret sharer, but one morning, he was gone, given away to someone who had the space and the money to care for him. I never forgot my beagle.

    There on the book's cover was a beagle which looked identical（相同的）to my dog. I ran my fingers over the picture of the dog on the cover. My eyes ran across the title, Amos, the Beagle with a Plan. Unknowingly, I had read the title. Without opening the book, I borrowed it from the library for the summer.

Under the shade of a bush, I started to read about Amos. I read very, very slowly with difficulty. Though pages were turned slowly, I got the main idea of the story about a dog who, like mine, had been separated from his family and who finally found his way back home. That dog was my dog, and I was the little boy in the book. At the end of the story, my mind continued the final scene of reunion, on and on, until my own lost dog and I were, in my mind, running together.

    My mother's call returned me to the real world. I suddenly realized something: I had read a book, and I had loved reading that book. Everyone knew I could not read. But I had read it. Books could be incredibly wonderful and I was going to read them.

    I never told my mother about my “miraculous” (奇迹般地) experience that summer, but she saw a slow but remarkable improvement in my classroom performance during the next year. And years later, she was proud that her son had read thousands of books, was awarded a PhD in literature, and authored his own books, articles, poetry and fiction. The power of the words has held.

    When was the last time you told someone they inspire you to go to work each morning?

    Teachers at Oak Park High School in Kansas City, Missouri, did just that this September, when they pulled individual students out of class to tell them just how much they appreciated them.

    The students' reactions, which were captured (捕捉) on video and shared on YouTube in a now-viral video, ranged from shy thanks to hugs and tears.

    “I have been challenged to find a student who makes me want to come to school every day,” says one teacher in the video, “and that's you.”

    Jamie McSparin, a teacher in charge of the school's academy program for at-risk sophomores （二年级学生）and juniors, posed the challenge, writes ABC News.

    “Initially when we pulled the kids out, they all thought they were in trouble,” McSparin told ABC News. “Any teacher-student interaction always seems to be negative (消极的), and that was something that bothered me, too. No matter if they're a good kid or a trouble maker or anything, they always thought they were in trouble,” she says.

    McSparin says she got the idea for the project after attending a professional development workshop this summer called the power of positivity.

    “I like the idea of letting students know they are appreciated, because we do appreciate them, I just don't think we say it enough,” she told local news outlet WDAF-TV.

    It's safe to say the challenge was effective.

    “I feel special,” said one of the boys in the video. “You should,” said his teacher. “You are special.”

    In 2012 my wife and I decided to open our bookstore in spite of unfavorable situations. The challenges facing small bookstores were-and remain-significant. Apart from the obvious rise in online selling, the increase in the popularity of e-books has negatively affected independent providers.

    The question is why a new, small-scale（小规模的）provide would voluntarily enter such a challenging market? From a personal view, our reasoning was sound: we wanted to share our love of great books and reading for pleasure with as many like-minded people as possible.

    Having done our homework, one thing became clear. In order for us to succeed, we would have to offer something that none of our larger competitors already provided. And so we started the Willoughby Book Club. We set up our website in the summer of 2012, and we haven't looked back.

    The idea of service is simple. We offer a range of book subscription gift packages, available in three-month, six-month and 12-month options. Our customers choose a package, tell us a little about the person they're buying it for, and we use this information to send the receiver a hand-picked, gift-wrapped book once a month. We also recently decided to give one new book to Book Aid International for every gift subscription sold. These books are sent out to sub-Saharan Africa, supporting the educational work there. Within four months of starting out, we won the Young Bookseller of the Year Award at the 2013 Bookseller awards.

    Our brief journey from new booksellers to award receivers has been challenging and rewarding. The biggest thing we've learned is that, despite the pressures facing independent providers, there is a place for them in the UK market. It's just a question of finding it.

    Looking back on the first twenty years of my life, I feel grateful to have been so healthy and happy. For my happiness, I am grateful to so many people and lucky events, but what have guided me and supported me in my life are my physical health, healthy finances, and my family's happiness.

    Health comes first for me, because without health everything else is meaningless. Imagine starting a career without good health. Imagine starting a family without good health. Imagine achieving anything without good health. Clearly, good health is the first necessary for other part of one's life.

    Good health is not enough to be happy. We still need to have money in today's society. Money obviously pays for basic needs of life — food, housing, clothing — but it is also necessary for other reason like the quality of our education and medical care.

    Next comes the most important thing in having a happy life — our family. It provides the love, joy and support that everybody needs. I love my family with all my heart. I get pleasure from their pleasure. I suffer when they suffer. My family helped me get through the hard times of entrance exams. They comforted and advised me when I had misunderstanding with my friends. More importantly, they have been there to share in my successes in the past twenty years. In summary, all these are what I need and want in this world. As long as I stay healthy, earn enough money, and share both good times and bad times with my family, I will always be the happiest girl in the world.

    A mystery surrounds my grandmother's collection of salt cellars (盐瓶). No one in the family seems to know when she started collecting them, or exactly how many she had.

    My grandmother died just over two years ago. At 91, she had spent 30 years without her right leg, which was removed due to cancer the year I was born. She was a poet, an artist, a food lover and a salt cellar collector. The funny thing about the salts, as she called them — I never once heard her say salt cellar — was that although everybody knew they were her hobby and everyone was always searching for them at yard sales or in stores, nobody seemed to know what they meant to her and they just wanted to make her happy. Grandma kept her salts in a dark wooden corner display case in the living room. Since her death the case has remained exactly as she left it. Grandpa tries his best to preserve his memories of her just as they are.

    Now I am collecting, too. Collecting memories about my grandmother's hobby, a way she spent her time. And as I hold one of them in my hand, I picture her holding it in her hand on the day she got it. She is smiling. My mother and her two sisters all have small collections, but my mother admits that she was more interested in finding salts to send to Grandma.

    Grandma once wrote a poem titled “When April Comes”. The poem contains the line, “When April comes and I am not around, remember me when daffodils are found.” Now, Grandpa is working on a poem with the line, “April came and you were not around”.

    But she was, somehow. She was there in the memories left behind by her possessions.

    A team of engineers at Harvard University in trying to create the first robotic fly. Designed to do what a fly does naturally, the tiny is the size of a fat housefly. Its mini wings allow it to stay in the air and perform controlled flight tasks.

    "The added difficulty with a project like this is that actually none of its components is off the shelf and so we have to develop them all on our own' said Robert Wood, a Harvard engineering professor.

    They engineered a series of systems to start and drive the robotic fly. "The seemingly simple system which just moves the wings has a number of interdependencies (相互依赖）on the individual components, each of which individually has to perform well, but then has to be matched well to everything it d connected to," said Wood.

    While this first robotic flyer is linked to a small, off-board power source, the goal is eventually to equip it with a built-in power source, so that it might someday perform data-gathering work at rescue sites, in farmers' fields or on the battlefield. "Basically it should be able to take off, land and fly around," he said.

    Wood says the design offers a new way to study flight mechanics and control at insect-scale. Yet, the power, sensing and computation technologies on board could have much broader applications." You can start thinking about using them to answer open scientific questions, you know, to study biology in ways that would be difficult with the animal, but using these robots instead" he said. "So there are a lot of technologies and open interesting scientific questions that are really what drives us on a day-to-day basis."