Volunteering at a nursing home is an often overlooked volunteer area and yet one of the most needed. Statistics show that only 50 percent of nursing home residents have no close relatives and 46 percent have no living children. {#blank#}1{#/blank#}However, the self gratification and relationships you will receive is too unusual to be replaced.

    Make a list of nursing homes you are able to volunteer at on a regular basis. When doing this, use any resources from family members, friends, or even use an online search engine to find nursing homes. When choosing your home, also keep in mind your schedule; make sure that you can be fully committed to any obligations that the nursing home may give you. {#blank#}2{#/blank#}

    {#blank#}3{#/blank#}Before calling, choose your times wisely, anytime between 9am-11am and 2pm-5pm would be a good option. By avoiding meal times or later at night, you'll have a better chance for getting information and finding people who are free to talk with you.

    Ask for an application form. {#blank#}4{#/blank#}This step is also where your applicant process begins. They will hand you all necessary applicant information. Most nursing homes will conduct interviews, do background checks, and may even have you receive vaccines and take drug tests.

    Become a "volunteer in training" at the nursing home. {#blank#}5{#/blank#}Because of the wide variety of possible areas, you may experience variations in your training length and the content may vary.

A. Expect to attend training if your application is approved.

B. Call or visit the top three of your chosen nursing home options.

C. Volunteering at a nursing home can be a really wonderful experience.

D. From your list, choose the top three that cater to what you are looking for.

E. You will be taken into training depending on the area you are assigned to train in.

F. The process of becoming a volunteer at a nursing home can often be a little too long.

G. The activity director or volunteer coordinator will handle all of your information from here.

    You don't have to be a superhero to help the environment. Even small, simple actions can add up to big change. People around the world will celebrate Earth Day on April 22. But anyone – including kids – can work to help the earth at any time. TFK (Time for Kids) talked to a few kids about how they are protecting the planet. Let them inspire you!

    Mari, 10, lives in Flint, Michigan, where people have been without clean drinking water since 2014. That is when the water became polluted with lead（铅）. Children in Flint have suffered from health problems due to lead poisoning. Mari has worked hard to spread awareness of Flint's water crisis by organizing fundraisers and other events.

    At age 3, Ryan went with his dad to recycling center near his home, in Orange County, California. The next day, Ryan began collecting recyclables from neighbors. Soon, Ryan's Recycling Company was born. “Recycling keeps bottles and cans out of the ocean,” Ryan, now 8, told TFK, “so animals don't get sick from them and die.” So far, Ryan has helped customers recycle 320,000 bottles and cans. He has also donated nearly $6,000 to the Pacific Marine Mammal Center.

    Joris, 11, has always loved cheetahs. When he learned that the big cats might disappear in his lifetime, he set out to help protect them. Joris began raising money. So far, Joris has raised more than $14,000. The money goes to a wildlife sanctuary（避难所）in Namibia, a country in Africa. This helps prevent the animals from being killed. Jorin has spent three summers volunteering at the sanctuary.

    Shyness is the cause of much unhappiness for a great many people. Shy people are anxious and self-conscious; that is, they are excessively concerned with their own appearance and actions.

    Worrisome thoughts are constantly occurring in their minds: what kind of impression am I making? Do they like me? Do I sound stupid? Am I wearing unattractive clothes? It is obvious that such uncomfortable feelings must negatively affect people. A person's conception of himself or herself is reflected in the way he or she behaves, and the way a person behaves affects other people's reactions. In general, the way people think about themselves has a profound effect on all areas of their lives.

    Shy people, having low self-esteem, are likely to be passive and easily influenced by others. They need reassurance that they are doing "the right thing." Shy people are very sensitive to criticism; they feel it confirms their feelings of inferiority. They also find it difficult to be pleased by compliment with a statement like this one, "You're just saying that to make me feel good. I know it's not true." It is clear that while self-awareness is a healthy quality, overdoing it is harmful.

    Can shyness be completely eliminated, or at least reduced? Fortunately, people can overcome shyness with determined and patient efforts in building self-confidence. Since shyness goes hand in hand with a lack of self-esteem, it is important for people to accept their weaknesses as well as their strengths. Each one of us is a unique, worthwhile individual, interested in our own personal ways. The better we understand ourselves, the easier it becomes to live up to our full potential. Let's not allow shyness to block our chances for a rich and fulfilling life.

    An organization, Eye Care 4 Kids, is bringing much-needed eye care to poor kids. It provides free eye examinations for kids from poor families. Founded by Joseph Carbone in 2001, the organization has helped around 100,000 children in Utah and Nevada.

    Now, Cecil Swyers, a biomedical(生物医学的) engineer who was once a poor child himself, is bringing the charity's(慈善) services to poor students in Arizona, so that vision impairment(视力受损) doesn't stand in the way of their education.

    “Eye Care 4 Kids is bringing eye care and glasses to families that wouldn't have the means to pay for them,” said Mario Ventura from Isaac Elementary School District, the first school district in Arizona to receive its services.

    Good vision is important to a child's learning experience. According to a study, up to 80 percent of learning happens through sight for children between 6 and 18 years old. Without proper eye care, it's difficult for students to learn better and succeed.

    Swyers is hoping that by bringing the organization to Arizona he'll help a lot more students. He teamed up with two other organizations to get doctors to volunteer their time with the group. Using an Eye Care 4 Kids mobile clinic, Swyers visited Alta E. Butler Elementary School and has already helped 40 students.

    The school was grateful to receive the eye care, especially since the services came to them. “It's great for us,” said Assistant Principal Cindy Alonso.

    Swyers is hoping to bring Eye Care 4 Kids' services to other schools in the state. He said that hopefully his work will have a positive effect on students' futures. “If we can help students while they're young, we can make a difference in their futures,” he said.

    Cao Yuan, a PhD student from China, had two papers published on strange behaviour in atom-thick layers of carbon that have opened up a new field of physics.

    Pablo Jarillo-Herrero's group at MIT was already layering and rotating (旋转) sheets of carbon at different angles when Cao joined the lab in 2014. Cao's job was to find out what happened when one graphene (石墨烯) sheet was twisted only slightly wiht respect to the other, which one theory predicted would thoroughly change the material's behaviour.

    Many physicists doubted the idea. But when Cao set out to create the subtly twisted stacks, he spotted something strange. Exposed to a small electric field and cooled to 1.7 degrees above absolute zero, the graphene—which ordinarily conducts electricity—became an insulator. That by itself was surprising. But the best was yet to come: with a slight change to the field, the twisted sheets became a superconductor, in which electricity flowed without resistance.

    The ability to get atom-thick carbon into a complex electronic state through a simple rotation now has physics demanding to engineer exciting behavior in other twisted 2D materials. Some even hope that graphene could shed light on how more-complex materials superconduct at much higher temperatures. "There are so many things we can do," says Cory Dean, a physicist at Columbia University. "The opportunities at hand now are almost irresistible."

    Hitting graphene's “magic angle”—a rotation between parallel sheets of around 1.1°—involved some trial and error, but Cao was soon able to do it reliably. His experimental skill was extremely important, says his supervisor Jarillo-Herrero. Cao pioneered a method of tearing a single sheet of graphene so that he could create a stack of two layers, from which he could then fine-tune alignment (微调校准).

    Cao loves to take things apart and rebuild them. A heart, he is “a tinkerer”, his supervisor says. On his own time, this means photographing the night sky using homemade cameras and telescopes—pieces of which usually lie across Cao's office. "Every ime I go in, it's a huge mess, with computers taken apart and pieces of telescope all over his desk," says Jarillo-Herrero.

    Have you ever run into a careless cell phone user on the street? Perhaps they were busy talking, texting or checking updates on We Chat without looking at what was going on around them. As the number of this new “species” of human has kept rising, they have been given a new name—phubbers (低头族).

    Recently, a cartoon created by students from China Central Academy of Fine Arts put this group of people under the spotlight. In the short film, phubbers with various social identities bury themselves in their phones, a doctor plays with his cell phone while letting his patient die, a pretty woman takes selfe in front of a car accident site, and a father loses his child without knowing about it while using his mobile phone, a chain of similar events eventually leads to a series of destruction.

    Although the ending sounds overstated, the damage phubbing can bring is real.

    Your health is the first to bear the consequence (后果) of it. “Constantly bending your head to check your cell phone could damage your neck,” Guangming Daily quoted doctors as saying. “The neck is like a rope that breaks after long-term stretching.” Also, staring at cell phones for long periods of time will damage your eyesight gradually, according to the report.

    But that's not all. Being a phubber could also damage your social skills and drive you away from your friends and family. At reunions with family or friends, many people tend to stick to their cell phones while others are chatting happily with each other and this creates a strange atmosphere, Qilu Evening News reported.

    It can also cost you your life. There have been lots of reports on phubbers who fell to their death, suffered accidents, and were robbed of their cell phones in broad daylight.