Barack Obama was born on August 4, 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii. His father came to America from Kenya, which is a country in Africa. His parents, Ann and Barack, met when they were students at the University of Hawaii. Since Barack had the same name as his father, young Barack went by the nickname “Barry”.

    In 1979, after he finished high school, Barry went to Occidental College in Los Angeles, California. There, he started to learn about his African roots and decided to use his African name, Barack. After two years in L.A., he went to Columbia University in New York City to study politics.

    After college, he moved to Chicago, Illinois, where he worked to help poor people in his city. He traveled to Africa to meet his grandmother and cousins for the first time. He went back many times over the years to visit with his family and learn about where he came from. At work, he met a lawyer named Michelle Robinson. They worked together in a big law firm. Then he left Chicago to go to Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He did very well in law school.

    After he was done with school, Barack moved back to Chicago and in 1992 he married Michelle. He worked as a lawyer, devoted to helping poor people for free who had been treated unfairly. He worked hard to get the people he helped to vote.

    He made many people believe that their votes were important, and helped them feel like they could make a difference.

    My husband and I had been married nearly twenty-two years when I acquired Stevens-Johnson syndrome, a disorder where my immune system (免疫系统) responded to a virus by producing painful blisters (水疱). Although my long-term evaluation was good, I, who had been so fiercely independent, rapidly became absolutely helpless.

    My husband, Scott, stepped up to the plate, taking care of kids and cooking dinners. He also became my personal caretaker, applying the medicine to all of my blisters because my hands couldn't do the job. Needless to say, I had negative emotions, bouncing from embarrassment to shame caused by total reliance on someone other than myself.

    At one point when I had mentally and physically hit bottoms I remember thinking that Scott must somehow love me more than I could ever love him. With my illness, he had become the stronger one, and I was the weaker one. And this disturbed me.

    I recovered from my illness, but I couldn't seem to recover from the thought that I loved my husband less than he loved me. This seeming distinction in our love continued to annoy me for the year following my illness.

    Then recently Scott and I went on a long bike ride. He's an experienced cyclist; I'm quite the green hand. At one point with a strong headwind and sharp pain building in my tired legs, I really thought I couldn't go any further. Seeing me struggle, Scott pulled in front of me and yelled over his shoulder, “Stay close behind me.” As I fell into the draft of his six-foot-three-inch frame and followed his steps, I discovered that my legs quit burning and I was able to catch my breath. My husband was pulling me along again. At this very moment I woke up to what I now believe: during these and other tough times, love has the opportunity to become stronger when one partner learns to lean on the other.

    I pray my husband will always be strong and healthy. But if he should ever become the struggling one, whether on a bike ride or with an illness, I trust I'll be ready to call out to him: stay close behind me — my turn to pull you along.

    You may find yourself wondering: do blind people dream? Dream sleep is generated deep within the brain. As it is a function of the brain, and not the eyes, blind people dream as much as a sighted person would. It is interesting that the timing of the blindness in life may in fact influence the content of the dreams, however.

    Research has evaluated the sensory experiences of blind people while dreaming for decades. These findings have been interpreted (解释) within the context of sighted people's experience of dreams. It is useful to consider the content of all dreams to better understand where it differs among the blind.

    Most dreams contain features that are both visual and kinesthetic (related to movement, such as falling). More than half of dreams contain a sound. It is rare for people to describe other sensory experiences, such as those related to smell, taste, and pain. It is estimated that these latter three elements occur in less than 1 percent of dream reports. Interestingly, women more often experience smell and taste in their dreams while men more often report sound and pain.

    Blind people are more likely to report feelings of touch, taste, and smell in their dreams compared to sighted people. This likely corresponds to their waking experience which relies more on these senses. They do not have dramatic differences in dream content, except that they seem to have less aggression in their dreams.

    Despite these subtle differences in dream content, can blind people see when they dream? Some blind people actually can see in dreams, but it depends on when they lost their vision. Individuals who are born blind or those who become blind at a young age (typically by the age of 4 or 5 years) do not have visual imagery in their dreams. On the other hand, those who become blind after 5 or 6 years of age are able to see in their dreams. Therefore, there seems to be a window in the development of the brain in which the capacity to have visual dreams is established.

    The human face is a remarkable piece of work. The astonishing variety of facial features helps people recognize each other and is vital to the formation of complex societies. So is the face's ability to send emotional signals, whether through an unconscious red face or the artifice of a false smile. People spend much of their waking lives reading faces, for signs of attraction, hatred, trust and fraud. They also spend plenty of time trying to hide true feelings or intentions.

    Technology is rapidly catching up with the human ability to read faces. In America facial recognition is used by churches to track worshippers' attendance; in Britain, by retailers to spot past shoplifters. In China, it confirms the identities of ride-hailing drivers, permits tourists to enter attractions and lets people pay for things with a smile. Apple's new iPhone is expected to use it to unlock the home screen.

    Set against human skills, such applications might seem incremental(增值的). Some breakthroughs, such as flight or the Internet, obviously transform human abilities; facial recognition seems merely to encode(编码)them. Although faces are unique to individuals, they are also public, so technology does not, at first sight, interfere with something that is private. And yet the ability to record, store and analyze images of faces cheaply, quickly and on a vast scale promises one day to bring about fundamental changes to opinions of privacy, fairness and trust.

    Start with privacy. One big difference between faces and other biometric data, such as fingerprints, is that they work at a distance. Anyone with a phone can take a picture for facial-recognition programs to use. Facebook's bank of facial images cannot be used by others, but the Silicon Valley giant could obtain pictures of visitors to a car showroom, say, and later use facial recognition to serve them ads for cars. Law-enforcement agencies now have a powerful weapon in their ability to track criminals, but at enormous potential cost to citizens' privacy.

    The face is not just a name-tag. It displays a lot of other information—and machines can read that, too. Again, that promises benefits. Some firms are analyzing faces to provide automated diagnoses of rare genetic conditions, far earlier than would otherwise be possible. Systems that measure emotion may give autistic(孤独症的)people a grasp of social signals they find difficult.

    Scientists have found evidence of a link between social and economic status and childhood attention deficit disorder(ADHD)(注意力缺陷多动障碍)in the UK. A team led by the University of Exeter Medical School analysed data from the Millennium Cohort Study, a database of more than 19, 500 UK children born between 2000 and 2002 .The study was published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.

    Findings showed that more children with ADHD came from families below the poverty line than the UK population as a whole, with average family incomes for households whose study child was affected by ADHD at £324 per week, compared to £391 for those whose child was not. The study found the odds (机会)of parents in social housing having a child with ADHD was roughly three times greater than for those who owned their own homes.

    The team also found that the odds of younger mothers having a child with ADHD were significantly higher than for other mothers. Mothers with no qualifications were more than twice as likely to have a child with ADHD than those with degrees, and lone (孤独的)parents were more likely to have a child with ADHD diagnosis than households with two live-in parents.

    Information was gathered from surveys when the cohort children were nine months old, and at the ages of three, five, seven and eleven.

    Dr Ginny, of the University of Exeter Medical School, who led the study, said, "There is a genetic element to ADHD, but this study provides strong evidence that ADHD is also associated with a disadvantaged social and economic background. Some people believe that ADHD in children causes disadvantage to the economic situation of their family, but we found no evidence to support that theory. It's important to discover more about the causes of this disorder so that we can look towards prevention, and so that we can target treatment and support effectively. "

    Albert Einsein said," Only a life lived for others is worth living."

How does this job offer sound? You'll need to be available on short notice，including late at night and on weekends. You could be asked to do anything from helping at community events to responding to life-threatening emergencies (sometimes putting your own safety at risk). This job also involves a lot of regular training. Oh, and you won't be paid for any of this. Would you take the job?

    This job might not necessarily appeal to everyone, but if this sounds like an opportunity you'd eagerly accept，then you'd fit right in with Western Australia's 26,000 emergency service volunteers. The emergency services aren't the only industry benefiting from volunteers. Across both Australia and America, between a quarter and half of the population volunteer each year in areas including education, sports, health, religion, and social services.

    What motivates people to volunteer? Yes, volunteers don't get paid. But it doesn't mean people don't get benefits from volunteering. Indeed, research shows there are significant mental health benefits coming with volunteering. It can be a means to make new friends, build new skills or try things out of your comfort zone. It can also be a means to help loved ones. A case is someone close to me who recently lost her husband to a disease. When her husband was admitted to a nursing facility, she decided to volunteer for the patient advocacy committee. She found great support and felt she could make a difference in the lives of the patients. After her husband's passing, she decided to continue volunteering for the committee not only as a way to show gratitude for the great care her husband received but also because she made friends there. She found a way to put her career skills to use for the common good and keep active after retirement.

    There are countless ways to volunteer. No matter how you do it, it is definitely worth every minute you put into it.