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    Nowadays, the Internet is usually one of the first places a lonely heart turns to as the following story shows.    

    A 63-year-old retired woman in Zhengzhou, made headlines two days after she posted an advertisement on her Wechat(微信) page, in which she said she wanted to find a young female companion for a trip to Sanya, China's Southern Hainan island, a local newspaper Dahe Daily reported. In the advertisement, the Chinese dama (Chinese term for middle-aged and elderly women) surnamed (a person's last name) Li said she is in good health, and she was particularly looking forward to a sea trip this winter.

    "I have a daughter who works in Canada, and I don't want to disturb her. My husband rarely has time to travel with me. But I'm afraid of traveling alone, so I am looking for a sweet, happy young woman, aged between 19 and 25 to travel with me. Hope she could chat with me, take photos with me."

    At the end of the advertisement, Dama Li showed her sincerity by saying she would be responsible for all the costs of the trip, including accommodation(膳宿) and air tickets, plus an iPhone 7 as a gift. Dama Li told Dahe Daily that she did not expect her advertisement to receive so much attention. "My phone keeps buzzing all the time. "However, some people question the truth of Li's advertisement. They say it might be organized by travel agencies aiming to promote(促进，推销) Sanya tourism, or even served as a promotional advertisement for real estate（房地产） on the island. Li denied those doubts and said all she wants is just to find a sweet "daughter".

    But Li's advertisement for a daughter has also received as many online mockeries(嘲笑) as positive feedback.

    I travel a lot in my work, and what I dislike about my job is eating alone. It always makes me feel lonely to see others laughing and talking. So, room service for several nights was a better choice for me.

    After having room service three nights at a hotel in Houston, however, I needed to get out of my room. Although the restaurant opened at 6:30, I arrived at 6:25. The waiter at the front desk made a comment(评论) about my “being there really early”. I explained my dislike of eating alone in restaurants. He then seated me at a lovely table and asked me whether I would mind if he sat down with me for a while.

    I was glad! He sat and talked with me about his career goals and the difficulty of being at work on nights, weekends and holidays. He said he hadn't enough time to be with his family. After 15 minutes, he saw some customers at the front desk and excused himself. I noticed that before he went to the front desk, he stopped in the kitchen for a moment.

    Then another waiter came out of the kitchen and had a wonderful chat with me. Before I left that night, some other waiters, even the cook, had come out of the kitchen and sat with me!

    When I asked for my bill about one hour later, all the people who had sat down with me came over in a big group to my table, and presented me with a red rose. And I cried! What had begun as a lonely night ended as a beautiful experience.

    One day a professor entered the classroom and asked his students to prepare for a surprise test. They waited anxiously at their desks for the test to begin. The professor handed out the question paper, with the text facing down as usual. Once he handed them all out, he asked his students to turn the page and begin. To everyone's surprise, there were no questions but a black dot in the center of the page. The professor seeing the expression on everyone' face, told them the following, "I want you to write what you see there."

    The students were confused and got started on the inexplicable (令人不解的) task.

    At the end of the class the professor took all the answer papers and started reading each one of them aloud in front of all the students. All of them with no exceptions, described the black dot, explained its position in the middle of the sheet, imagined what the black dot stood for and so on.

    After all had been read, the classroom was silent. The professor began to explain, "I am not going to grade on you this time. I just wanted to give you something to think about. No one wrote about the white part of the paper. Everyone focused on the black dot and the same happens in our lives. We have a white paper to observe and enjoy, but we always focus on the dark spots. Our life is filled with love and care, and we always have reasons to celebrate—nature renewing itself every day, our friends around us, the job that provides our livelihood, the miracles we see every day…"

    In fact, we insist on focusing only on the dark spots—the health issues that bother us, the lack of money, the complicated relationship with a family member, the disappointment with a friend, etc. Take your eyes away from the black spots in your life. The dark spots are very small compared to everything we have in our lives, so enjoy each moment that life gives you.

    Nelson Mandela is respected and admired around the world. To South Africa he is a superstar. He is a hero who shocked the world by fighting for peace between races, even though he spent 27 years in the prison of the South Africa's white, racist regime(政权).

    Mandela, who won the nation's first all­race elections after the fall of apartheid (种族隔离) in 1994, retired in 1999. But even now, he is as popular as ever.

    His popularity has inspired an entire national industry. His portrait (肖像) has appeared at many places, including on some goods. His face has appeared on a South African coin, a district of a city was named in his honor and some business leaders hope to build a giant statue that looks like him—the Statue of Freedom in celebration of his birthday. It would stand taller than New York's Statue of Liberty.

    His popularity is similar to that of John F. Kennedy in the US or Winston Churchill in Britain, but few politicians today have achieved his level of admiration, said Tom Lodge, head of the Political Science Department of the University of the Witwatersrand.

    "Sometimes it isn't completely appreciated what a skilled performer Mandela has been throughout his political career. He's a very, very clever man."

    However, he is far from perfect.

    Most articles about his birthday, which appeared in every major South African newspaper on the day, briefly mentioned that Mandela did have shortcomings.

    Then they returned to their following praises.

    "Through the ages, the human race has had its icons(偶像)—men and women who rose above ordinary people to inspire their generations," The Mail and Guardian Weekly said, "In our generation, the god brought us Nelson Mandela."

Are we alone in the universe? A team of scientists announced on January 6, 2015 that they had identified eight planets beyond our solar system, three or four of which orbit in their stars' "Goldilocks Zone" — the region where temperatures are not too hot or too cold for water, which is a necessary ingredient for life as we know it, to exist liquid form. This may be good news for people hoping that Earth is not the only inhabited world in the universe.

    The scientists, led by Dr. Guilermo Torres of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, made the discoveries using data collected by the planet-seeking Kepler telescope.

    NASA launched Kepler in 2009. Since then, the telescope has identified more than 1,000 planets outside of our solar system. Torres and his team analyzed the data about the eight newly discovered world to determine which ones are most likely to be similar to our Earth.

    Among the new discoveries, the scientists say the planets called Kepler438b and 442b are the closest to Earth. Kepler 438b is just about 10% larger than our planet, and gets 40% more of its energy from its star than Earth receives from the Sun. Temperatures there would be about 140 degrees. Kepler 442b is about 33% larger than Earth, but receives 30% less energy from its star. That would make it a potentially chillier world than our own. Torres says it is possible for life to exist and survive in either of those temperatures, but for that to happen, these planets would need to have another key ingredient for life: a heat-trapping atmosphere like Earth's.

    While these findings add to the possibility that life exists beyond Earth, Torres cautions against drawing conclusions, “We are not claiming they are inhabited,” he says. In fact, these planets are so far away that the scientists cannot observe them directly, which can be explanation for why for now it remains unknown whether these planets contain life. But the discovery of planets in their stars' habitable zones suggests that somewhere out there, some form of alien life may have taken hold.

Damian Stefaniuk and his colleagues at Massachusetts Institute of Technology （MIT） have developed a novel energy storage device—a supercapacitor— using three basic, inexpensive materials： water, cement, and a soot （煤灰）, which can carry electricity. 

Supercapacitors are highly efficient at storing energy but differ from batteries in some important ways. They can charge much more quickly than a lithium （锂） battery and don't experience the same level of performance decline over time. But supercapacitors also release the power they store rapidly, making them less useful in devices such as mobile phones, laptops or electric cars where a steady supply of energy is needed over an extended period of time. 

Yet according to Stefaniuk, these supercapacitors could make an important contribution to efforts to reduce carbon emissions and make the global economy more environmentally friendly. "If it can be scaled up, the technology can help solve an important issue— the storing of renewable energy," he says. 

He and his fellow researchers at MIT envision several applications for their supercapacitors. One might be to create roads that store solar energy and then release it to recharge electric cars wirelessly as they drive along a road. The rapid release of energy from the supercapacitors would allow vehicles to get a rapid boost to their batteries. Another application would be using supercapacitors in the foundations or walls of houses, so that these parts of the house not only support the structure but also store energy. 

"But it's still early stages. Right now, the supercapacitor made from building materials can only store just under 300 watt-hours per cubic meter, enough to power a 10-watt LED light for 30 hours. The power might seem low compared to regular batteries, but a foundation made from 30-40 cubic meters of this material could meet the daily energy needs of a house," says Stefaniuk. "Since this material is used so widely around the world, it has the potential to be very competitive and useful for energy storage."