That children are the hopes of our tomorrow is a statement that is repeated time and again. And it is an axiom (格言); they are our pillars of the coming time. But then do we train them into becoming healthy human beings?

    Healthy human beings here are not meant the physical well being, but the good human king, that is, one with virtues and values keeps them in the state of working towards the benefit of humanity.

    How can children absorb within themselves the virtues and values? Well, this is the primary responsibility of parents and other immediate family members, followed by school authorities. The values and virtues of an individual is sown in their childhood and nurtured as they grow up.

    Depending on the way we bring up our children, we decide our own future. It is vital that in the formative years we give them quality time and attention. We teach them to discriminate the good, bad and the ugly. We have to teach them use positive emotions like love and compassion and teach them actions of kindness and generosity. At the same time we have to help them do away with the negatives of hatred, anger, jealousy, selfishness, etc.

    Your child is like a plant. You sow the seeds and also reap the benefits of its growth and development. First and foremost you as a paren. have to realize your responsibility in nurturing a child to grow into a good human being. And it is just not up to anyone of the parents, but both together to inculcate (谆谆教海) the values and virtues into your child.

    Many little girls like flowers, watching butterflies and riding small horses. A lot of them also like cars, robots and spaceships. But most girls' clothing only has pictures of flowers, butterflies or horses.

    Two mothers decided to make clothes that include all the things that little girls do and love.

    Six-year-old Bella loves to play with cars. So her dress has pictures of cars on it.

    “We haven't found this type of dress in the store,” Cathy, Bella's mother, says.

    The car dress is from a new girl's clothing line called Princess Awesome. Rebecca Melsky set up the business. She says its products (产品) for girls have some designs normally found on boys' clothes.

    It all started two years ago when Rebecca was hoping to buy clothing for her two-year-old, who liked robots, trucks and spaceships.

    “One day when I walked through a girls' store. I thought to myself I wish they'd make one of those beautiful dresses that also have a robot on it because she will love that. And I thought someone should do that. Maybe I should do that.” Rebecca said.

    Her friend Eva St. Clair believed she should, and their business was born. The women sold the first 70 dresses they made at a market. So they decided to expand(扩展）their business online. Their products sold very well there, too.

    “They sold out so fast that I could not make them fast enough. We decided it was time to think about a factory,” Rebecca said.

    So they started to raise money from people over the Internet. The women raised more than $215,000 within days, far more than the $35,000 they expected.

    “Our biggest challenge (挑战) is going to be how we expand as rapidly as people seem to want us to,” Rebecca said.

    The women hope Princess Awesome will expand into products for girls of all ages and all interests.

    Think of a seed buried in a pot. It's dark down there in the potting soil. There's no light, no sunshine. So how does it know which way is up and which way is down? It does know. Seeds send shoots up toward the sky, and roots the other way. Darkness doesn't confuse them. Somehow, they get it right.

    More surprisingly, if you turn a seedling (秧苗) or a whole bunch of seedlings upside down, as Thomas Andrew Knight of the Royal Society did around 200 years ago, the tips and roots of the plant will sense, “Hey, I'm upside down. Look! I. will turn my way to the right direction and do a U-turn.”

    How do they know? According to botanist Daniel Chamovitz, Thomas Knight about 200 years ago guessed that plants must sense gravity. Knight proved it with a crazy experiment involving a spinning plate.

    He attached a bunch of plant seedlings onto a disc. The plate was then turned by a water wheel powered by a local stream at a speed of 150 revolutions (旋转) per minute for several days.

    If you have been at an amusement park in a spinning teacup, you know that because of centrifugal force (离心力) you get pushed away from the center of the spinning object toward the outside.

    Knight wondered, would the plants respond to the centrifugal pull of gravity and point their roots to the outside of the spinning plate? When he looked, that's what they'd done. Every plant on the disc had responded to the pull of gravity, and pointed its roots to the outside. The roots pointed out, and the shoots pointed in. So Thomas Knight proved that plants can and do sense the pull.

    There were no people on the park bench as I sat down to read beneath the branches of an old willow tree, with good reasons to sigh, for the world was dragging me down. At this time, a boy approached me. He stood right before me, and said with great excitement, “Look what I found!”

    In his hand was a flower, and what a pitiful sight, with its petals (花瓣) all worn. Wanting him to take his flower and go off to play, I managed a smile and then turned to the other side.

    But instead of leaving, he sat next to my side and placed the flower to his nose and said firmly and clearly, “It really smells pretty and it's beautiful, too. That's why I picked it. Here it's for you.”

    The flower before me was dying or dead. But I knew I must take it, or he might never leave. So I reached for the flower, and replied, “Just what I need.”

    But instead of placing the flower in my hand, he held it in mid-air. It was then that I noticed that the boy was blind.

    I heard my voice quiver (轻微颤抖), and at the same time my tears shone like the sun. As I thanked him for picking the very best one, he smiled and said, “You're welcome.”

    And then he ran off to play, not knowing the influence he'd had on me.

    I sat there and wondered how he managed to see a self-pitying woman beneath an old willow tree. Perhaps from his heart, he'd been blessed with true sight.

    Through the eyes of the blind boy, I could see the problem was not with the world; the problem was me. And for all of those times I had been blind. From now on, I promised to see beauty and appreciate every second. Then I held the flower up to my nose and breathed its fragrance and smiled as that young boy.

    My college experience included this life-skill lesson: Drink alcohol on a full stomach. Or you will get inebriated too quickly. Of course, most college students shouldn't be drinking at all, but we know from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism that close to 60 percent of college students aged 18 to 22 do consume alcohol, which makes harm-reducing approaches important.

    Unfortunately, campus authorities and researchers are reporting a practice that turns the full-stomach drinking strategy on its head: rather than filling up before a night of partying, significant numbers of students refuse to eat all day before consuming alcohol.

    This is a high-risk behavior called "drunkorexia," which is one part eating disorder, one part alcoholism—a very dangerous combination for college-age students. The term drunkorexia, which can also include excessive exercise or purging before consuming alcohol, was coined about 10 years ago, and it started showing up in medical research around 2012. Drunkorexia addresses the need to be the life of the party while staying extremely thin, pointing to a flawed mind-set about body image and alcoholism among college students, mostly women.

    Imagine this scenario: A female college freshman doesn't eat anything all day, exercises on an empty stomach, then downs five shots of tequila in less than two hours. Because there's no food in her system to help slow the absorption of alcohol, those shots affect her rapidly, leading to inebriation and possibly passing out, vomiting or suffering alcohol poisoning. That's drunkorexia.

    Tavis Glassman, professor of health education and public health at the University of Toledo in Ohio, researches drunkorexia and worries about scenarios such as the one described above: "With nothing in her system, alcohol hits quickly, and that brings up the same issues as with any high-risk drinking: getting home safely, sexual assault, unintentional injury, fights, hangovers that affect class attendance and grades, and possibly ending up in emergency because the alcohol hits so hard," he says.

    "Alcohol can negatively affect the liver or gastrointestinal system, it can interfere with sleep, lower the immune system and is linked to several types of cancers," Hultin says.

Are you a moviegoer? If, like me, you're a fan of film, then there's no better place to watch something than on the big screen at the cinema. You enter the dark theatre and take your seat, ready to be entertained. But while you are absorbed in some movie magic, many others are now getting their film fixed at home.

Over the last few years, cinemas have seen a comeback. Customers have been attracted by comfortable seats, and lots of choice of things to watch. Multiplexes in particular can screen up to twenty films at the same time, suiting all different tastes. In addition, 3D and even 4D movies can give the audience an extra immersive experience. So what's not to like about a trip to the cinema?

The coronavirus pandemic has put the future of cinema under the spotlight. Some have had to close because of reduced ticket sales. In the UK, it's brought about a surge in TV watching and online streaming. It's reported that half of UK adults will keep and continue using their new streaming subscriptions.

This isn't great news for cinemas. They rely on the release of a big blockbuster to bring the crowds back, but the launch of new films, such as James Bond: No Time To Die, are being delayed. Disney has released its $200m blockbuster, Mulan, online instead of in movie theatres. John Fithian, from the National Association of Theatre Owners, told Variety magazine: This idea of waiting out the pandemic to make your movies more profitable doesn't make sense to me. There won't be as much of an industry left to play your movies in if you do that. "