What would it be like to walk on Mars? If you could build the highest building in the world，what would it look like? Do you dream of being the next J. K. Rowling? This summer, you can experience all of these things, and more. All you need is an Internet connection and your imagination.

    A recent study by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that kids spend an average of 1 hour and 29 minutes online each day. Many kids like to use that time to chat with friends, play games or check e­mails. But the next time you get on the Web, try exploring the world instead. “With the Internet，you can go back 11,000 years in time，or go 11,000 kilometers across the planet.” said Russell, Web search expert of Google. “The whole scope of history and the world is open to you.”

    There is a wealth of information to be found online. For example, if your family is going on vacation somewhere, do a quick online search on the area before you even get in the car. “What's the background of the place; what's the history？” says Russell. “I like to tell my kids, ‘Whenever you have a question, whenever you have a doubt, search it out.'”

    Ready to launch a virtual journey of your own? Here are a few starting points to get you thinking and to help you on your way. You can invite your parents along for the ride, too. Always ask for permission before downloading programs and software onto your computer. And check with a parent or an adult before visiting any new Web site.

    Navigate the world in 3­D with Google Earth. Begin in outer space and zoom (快速移动) into the streets of any city, from Hong Kong to San Francisco. Or visit ancient monuments, watch the changing rainforests over time, and dive underwater to explore tropical reef.

    With the Moon in Google Earth tool, you can walk in Neil Armstrong's famous footsteps. Take a guided tour of the moon's surface with Armstrong's fellow shuttle mate astronaut Buzz Aldrin.

    When you're exploring that part of the solar system, hop on over to the Red Planet with Google Mars. There, you can move very quickly around the surface and see images from the Mars Rovers.

    Travis is the manager of G&G where he is responsible for forty employees (雇员)and profits (利润) of over $2 million per year. He's never late to work. He does not get upset on the job. When one of his employees started crying after a customer screamed at her, Travis took her away. "Your working uniform is your shelter," he told her. "Nothing anyone says will ever hurt you. You will always be as strong as you want to be."

    Travis picked up that lecture in one of his G&G training courses, an education program that began on his first day and continues throughout an employee's occupation. The training has, Travis says, changed his life. G&G has taught him how to live, how to focus, how to get to work on time, and how to master his emotions (情绪). Most importantly, it taught him willpower.

    At the center of that education is an extreme focus on an all-important habit; willpower. Dozens of cases show that willpower is the single most important habit for a person's success.

    And the best way to strengthen willpower is to make it into a habit. "Sometimes it looks like people with great self-control aren't working hard—but that's because they've made it automatic," Angela Duckworth, one of the University of Pennsylvania researchers said. "Their willpower occurs without them having to think about it."

    The company spent millions of dollars developing programs of study to train employees on self-control. Managers wrote workbooks that serve as guides to how to make willpower a habit in workers' lives. Those courses arc, in part, why G&G has grown from a sleepy company into a large one with more than seventeen thousand stores and profits of more than $10 billion a year.

Evening Workshops

    Optional evening workshops will be held at small restaurants or other meeting places near the conference hotel. Meals and other costs are not included but are also optional. Locations will be announced at the conference site. Workshops are very loosely organized and most represent discussions that have been held at Society for Economic Botany (SEB) meetings over a series of years.

    Workshop 1: Student Network

    Date: Wednesday evening, Feb. 5^th

    Chairs: Hugo de Boer and Arika Virapongse Sponsor: Society for Economic Botany

    Description: Student members of the SEB hold a networking mixer each year in order to meet each other and to become familiar with a variety of educational programs and faculty advisors(大学指导老师). Faculty members who are part of training programs are encouraged to join the mixer to meet and talk with students.
     Workshop 2: Botanical Film Making
    Date : Wednesday evening, Feb. 5^th Chair : David Strauch

    Sponsor : University of Hawaii

    Description : Digit al film making is a particularly useful tool of linking cultural information to recognizable plants. This workshop is aimed towards increasing the quality of material recorded by giving participants greater control over the medium. We will cover technical aspects (e.g. camera settings, audio), technical aspects (framing, lighting, focus), and some ways of presenting the material. Experienced filmmakers are encouraged to attend, and participants are welcome to bring their own camera equipment.

    Workshop 3: Collections for Botany

    — Collections Development and Management Date: Friday evening, Feb. 7^th

    Chair: Jan Salick

    Sponsor: Society for Economic Botany

    Description: SEB is a network of researchers who have been developing standards for the development of collections of artifacts, plant samples and related materials. Participants discuss successes, problems, and funding sources for solving management issues.

    The City of Christchurch, New Zealand was struck by a 7.1­magnitude earthquake on the early morning of Saturday, September 4, 2010.

    No tsunami alert was reported. The country's army troops were on standby to assist victims and disaster recovery operation. New Zealand's Prime Minister John Key, flew to the affected area to inspect and assess the situation of the damaged city. The Prime Minister said that the full assessment of the damages would possibly take months to know the severity of damages. Based from his assessment on what he saw in the area, it could cost at least 2 billion New Zealand dollars or US$1.4 billion for reconstruction.

    "An absolute miracle that no one died," Prime Minister John Key said. Two were seriously injured from this quake and thousands of local residents were awakened after being shaken at 4:35 a.m. of that Saturday.

    There were people trapped inside the damaged buildings but fortunately none were reported dead from the rubble of the damaged buildings.

    "We're all feeling scared—we've just had some significant aftershocks," a survivor told TV One News. "Tonight we're just people in the face of a massive natural disaster, trying to help each other and we're grateful we haven't lost a life."

    GNS Science reported 29 aftershocks within the 14 hours after the quake, with strength from magnitude 3.7 to 5.4.

    New Zealand is no stranger to earthquakes. The country experiences more than 14,000 earthquakes a year—but only about 150 are felt by people.

    "Many buildings here were built with earthquake protection measures. However, in most cities in developing countries, people build how they want to and there're no building controls to force them to build to a higher standard that's safe," Andrew Charleson, an architecture professor at Victoria University of Wellington told CNN.

    The earliest known copy of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa—thought to have been painted at the same time as the original masterpiece—has been discovered at the Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain. The work offers art-lovers an attractive clue to what the model for the world's most famous painting really looked like. Controllers of the museum found the picture hidden beneath layers of paints during restoration work on a picture initially thought to have been a later replica(exact copy) of the Mona Lisa.

    The restored version shows the same woman that Leonardo depicted (描画), against a landscape similar to that shown in the background of the original, which now hangs in the Louvre in Paris. And while the features of Leonardo's Mona Lisa have been dulled by centuries of dirt and layers of cracked paints—which are unlikely ever to be removed—in the recently-rediscovered copy, she appears fresher-faced and younger than her better-known "twin".

    News of the find was revealed at a meeting at London's National Gallery, linked to its "Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan" exhibition. "This sensational (轰动的) find will transform our understanding of the world's most famous picture," the Art Newspaper reported, adding that the clues found on the Madrid version suggest that the original and the copy were begun at the same time and painted next to each other, as the work went on.

    Miguel Falomir, manager of Italian painting at the Prado, told reporters that expert analysis suggested a strong link between Leonardo and the artist who painted the copy. "The painting was done in the painter's own workshop," he said. "It is absolutely consistent with Leonardo's work, but Leonardo didn't actually do any work on it himself."

When we meet someone for the first time, we usually get a vague sense of what kind of person they are by the way they shake hands, talk, or walk. In the age of social networking, however, first impressions are sometimes made even before we actually meet someone in person—that is, by looking at their profile photo.

    According to a recent study, these social images say a lot about our personality. In the study, presented in a paper at the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, a group of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania in the US used software to analyze the profile pictures of 66,000 users of US social platform Twitter and 3,200 of their tweets. At the same time, about 434 participants were asked to complete a survey about their personality type. The researchers wanted to find out if there was a connection between personality traits—like openness, extroversion, and neuroticism(神经质)—and a person's profile picture.

    According to the results, open people are more likely to pose in an unusual way and use objects such as glasses or a guitar in their profile photo because they enjoy new and exciting experiences. Meanwhile, neurotic people often hold back their negative emotions. They try to avoid showing their face；Instead, they use an image of something like a pet, a car or a building.

    Apart from the objects in profile pictures, the colors used in them also give us some hints about the photo's owner. For example, extraverts were found to have the most colorful profile images, as they want to emphasize their personality and show themselves off, the researchers wrote.

    Although social media photos "usually represent an extension of one's self, they also allow a user to shape his or her own personality and idealized view," according to the researchers. So, when choosing a profile photo, maybe we should ask ourselves first what kind of image we'd like to convey. After all, first impressions always last.