As we all know, children are our future, and it's up to us to arm them with the tools to succeed. Sadly, today's children are sometimes being armed with more dangerous tools like weapons, drugs and gangs in the USA. Once a relatively peaceful environment, many schoolyards of today are becoming unsafe for both students and teachers.

    Home schools are available to give you choices. Home schooling provides top-quality education, flexibility and freedom to create your own schedule. At Sunny Home School we believe the choice should be yours.

    Thanks to modern technology, home schooling information is becoming readily available across the nation. A recent study by the ITBS (Iowa Tests of Basic Skills) and TAP (Tests of Achievement and Proficiency) shows us that students of home schools do particularly well when compared with the nationwide average. In every subject at every grade level, students of home schooling scored obviously higher than those in public and private schools.

    If you're new to home schooling, you may be asking yourself, “Will home schools really work for my children?”

Fact: A nationwide study using a random selection of 1,516 families found students of home schooling to be scoring, on average, at or above the 80^th percentile (百分位的第80位) in all areas, on standardized achievement test. (Note: The national average on standardized achievement test is the 50^th percentile.)

    Collectively, the staff at Sunny Home School brings 65 years of experience in home schooling curriculum. We've placed students in the top 2% of the nation in math and many are successfully moving on to college.

    One study found that of the home schooled students, 94% said home education prepared them to be independent persons.

    For more home schooling information, call us today toll free at (1800)542-8668.

    Three-day－old Oskar Lunde sleeps in a small bed at an Estonian(爱沙尼亚) hospital.

    Across the room, his father turns on a laptop computer. "Now we will register our child, "Andrei Lunde says as he lifts his identification card into the card reader. His wife, Olga, looks on. And just like that, Oskar is Estonia's newest citizen. No paper. No time spent standing in a line.

    Estonia has launched a project to make government administration completely digital. The goal is to reduce the size of the government work force, open up the decision-making process and fuel economic growth.

    Need medicine? Reach for a computer and send an email or text message to a doctor. Need help from the local government? Click on a link to the government websites…

    Estonia has created a system that supports electronic authentication(身份验证) and digital signatures. It provides paperless communications for both the government and private industry.

    However, there are a few things that one cannot do electronically in Estonia: marry, end a marriage or buy and sell property. That is only because the government has decided it is very important to show up in person for some big life events. When Estonia declared independence from the former Soviet Union in 1991, it had to build a new economy. Government leaders looked for an industry where the country could compete. They decided on information technology and the Internet.

    When the poor country needed to replace a 1930s phone system, former President Toomas Hendrik Ilves rejected the offer of a free analog(模拟) system from Finland and argued for a digital one.

    Last year, information and communications made up 5.9 percent of the economy. The government hopes to increase that figure with an "e-residency" program that lets businessmen around the world register their businesses in Estonia, thus gaining a presence in the European Union. More than 51, 000 people from 167 countries have registered at a cost of only 100 euros, or＄114 each.

    Hobbies in general are becoming something of the past. Our lives are already filled with classes, homework, working, relationships and sleeping. When we do have a spare moment, it is all too easy to spend it on the endless entertainment and media that are right at our fingertips.

    I do not doubt that there are some people who could become a great writer or musician. I only fear that so many people are busy pursuing their education and their careers, but they never even see the potential (潜能) they have. The next great photographer or singer could be going to college right now. But they might not even know they have a gift for photographing or singing if they've never picked up a camera or a guitar.

    Of course, the final goal of pursuing a new hobby shouldn't be to become rich and famous. For most people, a hobby is just something they enjoy doing for the purpose of the thing itself. Such hobbies are still very useful. Studies have shown that people who have a hobby are less likely to have stress and more likely to have more meaningful lives.

    Most importantly, a hobby is just something you do to make you happy. I hate to break it to you, but we all have a long lifetime of work and stress ahead of us. It will make things much easier if we can practice the piano or make some collections after work.

    Sure, it's not easy to start a new hobby while going to school, but it will likely never get easier than it is right now. So think about the thing that you have always wanted to try but were too embarrassed or busy or whatever. You never know, you might become the world's next great people. If not, you'll at least be a little more well-rounded, more interesting and less stressed.

Both humans and animals have enemies. 11 is easy for us to know the difference between our friends and our enemies. But can other animals do the same? Elephants can! They can use their sense of vision and smell to tell the difference between people who mean a threat and those who do not. In Kenya, researchers find that elephants react differently to clothing worn by men of the Maasai and Kamba ethnic groups. Young Maasai men hunt animals and thus mean a threat to elephants; Kamba men are mainly farmers and are not a danger to elephants.

In an experiment conducted by animal scientists, elephants were first presented with clean clothing or clothing that had been worn for five days by either a Maasai or a Kamba man. When the elephants noticed the smell of clothing worn by a Maasai man, they moved away from the smell faster and took longer to relax than when they noticed the smells of either clean clothing or clothing worn by a Kamba man.

Clothing color also plays a role. In the same study, when the elephants saw red clothing not worn before, they reacted angrily, as red is typically worn by Maasai men. Rather than running away as they did with the smell, the elephants acted angrily toward the red clothing.

The researchers believe that the elephants' emotional reactions arc due to their different senses of smell and sight. Smelling a possible danger means that a threat is nearby and the best thing to do is run away and hide. Seeing a potential threat without its smell means that risk is low. Therefore, instead of showing fear and running away, the elephants express their anger and become aggressive.

    In recent years, terms like "going green" and "eco-friendly" have become buzz words on talk shows, commercials and product packaging. The term "eco-friendly" has been used for so many different products and practices.

    Eco-friendly Car Race

    Can you imagine a car racer is so eco-friendly that its tyres are made from potatoes, its body is created from hemp (大麻) and rapeseed oil and it runs on fuel made from wheat and sugar beet (甜菜)? The one-seater racing car called Eco One is built by experts from Warwick University, who hope that Eco One will be adopted by the automotive industry. It is sold at $ 51,000.

    Pollution-sensitive Dress

    Don't be caught outside unaware of pollution levels in the air. The pollution-sensitive EPA Dress by Stephanie Sandstrom notices pollution in the air accordingly. This dress ­ which is actually quite pretty ­ looks like you pull it from the bottom of the dirty laundry pile when the air is dirty. It might protect your health by advising you to stay indoors for the day, but it won't do you any favor if you're meeting with clients.

    Eco-friendly Umbrella

    Traditional umbrellas come with a fixed surface. Although it is changeable, you cannot replace it easily. This eco-friendly design is more flexible. It is actually only an umbrella skeleton(骨架)without any surface, which can be folded, so you can put anything such as newspapers, plastic bags or whatever you want to serve as the protecting surface.

    Eco-friendly Moss (苔藓) Carpet

    It is said that walking on fresh grass increases your blood circulation. The Moss Carpet, created by Nguyen La Chanh, looks at getting the grass to your feet. The mat includes ball moss, island moss and forest moss. The humidity (湿度) of the bathroom ensures that it grows well. And that's why you need to place it there and not anywhere else.

    When an ice cube melts, it creates a puddle (水坑). When an ice sheet (冰盖)melts, it raises sea levels. It sounds simple, but scientists have debated for decades whether both the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets actually were shrinking, and how much that melting contributed to rising sea levels.

    Now, a new study has provided the best evidence of how the polar ice sheets are responding to our warming world. In the study, an international team of scientists looked at 20 years of' data in the ice sheets collected by 10 satellite missions. The team's conclusion: The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets both are losing ice overall. The researchers also found that between 1992 and 2011, melt water from those shrinking ice sheets caused sea levels to rise by about 11 millimeters.

    Over the 19 years studied, the Greenland ice sheet lost 2.7 trillion metric tons of ice. The Antarctic ice sheet also shrank by about 1.3 trillion metric tons. Previously, some scientists disagreed whether the Antarctic sheet, the largest mass of ice in the world, was shrinking or growing or neither.

    While the Earth is warming overall, the effect of climate change varies from region to region. Over the last 15 years, for example, scientists have something disagreed over how climate change has affected the polar ice sheets. Many studies found that the sheets lost a lot of ice and that not enough snow fell on the sheets to compensate for the loss. But other studies found that the loss of ice was balanced by the gain in snowfall.

    Richard Alley, a glacier scientist at Penn State University, said that many of those studies looked at different areas, and over different time periods. In addition, the studies didn't all use the satellite data in the same way. Those differences made, it difficult to compare the results.

    The data in the new study matched time periods and areas. The study also combined measurements from kinds of satellites.