For as long as I can remember, I've always wanted a personal motto. I wanted a saying that I could really try to live my life by. I mean all the humorous book and storybook heroes always have a personal principle they follow. Good manners! Courage! Keenness! But a part of me could never get myself to create my own motto because I never knew where to start and I never thought I could give one.

    “With great power comes great responsibility.” is a quote by the great writer and philosopher, Voltaire. More familiar, it makes an appearance in the modern day movie performance of the superhero Spider-Man. This saying provides a sense of responsibility for those with actually limitless power.

    “Be good to others and others will be good to you.” is another well-known proverb that has roots in almost all of the major religions. Although it is less practiced today than it is lectured, it is a powerful and good motto to live by. Kindness, in this sense, is the final power in judging every action.

    My personal motto today has an idea – being efficient. Through my limited knowledge, I have come to find that this is simply the best way for me to give insight about who I am and what I believe in.

 Efficiency is a quality that everyone desires for, right? Who doesn't want to be able to not only work fast but to achieve great results? To some, it may appear to be a frightening journey. But to me, it means that I have a lifelong journey to improve the methods and ideas with which I come near my tasks.

    Regardless of what motto you want to live by, I believe that everyone should have one, or two or more. These are all symbols of a perfect story of us, in our own view. And it immediately provides insight to the type of person we were, we are and what we strive to be. We are never meant to be perfect, but it is important to try and live by a belief that will help us reach our potential. All you have to do is know what your excitement is and live by it.

    One morning, Ann's neighbor Tracy found a lost dog wandering around the local elementary school. She asked Ann if she could keep an eye on the dog. Ann said that she could watch it only for the day.

    Tracy took photos of the dog and printed off 400 FOUND fliers（传单）, and put them in mailboxes. Meanwhile, Ann went to the dollar store and bought some pet supplies, warning her two sons not to fall in love with the dog. At the time, Ann's son Thomas was 10 years old, and Jack, who was recovering from a heart operation, was 21 years old.

    Four days later Ann was still looking after the dog, whom they had started to call Riley. When she arrived home from work, the dog threw itself against the screen door and barked madly at her. As soon as she opened the door, Riley dashed into the boys' room where Ann found Jack suffering from a heart attack. Riley ran over to Jack, but as soon as Ann bent over to help him the dog went silent.

     “If it hadn't come to get me, the doctor said Jack would have died,” Ann reported to a local newspaper. At this point, no one had called to claim the dog, so Ann decided to keep it.

    The next morning Tracy got a call. A man named Peter recognized his lost dog and called the number on the flier. Tracy started crying, and told him, “That dog saved my friend's son.”

    Peter drove to Ann's house to pick up his dog, and saw Thomas and Jack crying in the window. After a few moments Peter said, “Maybe Odie was supposed to find you, maybe you should keep it.”

    The lower East Side is neither rich nor beautiful, but it can be a good place to shop.

    On Sundays, its streets are crowded with visitors and shoppers like these. They are trying to find a coat or a pair of shoes at a good price.

    Most people prefer to shop in the big department stores like Macy's, Gimbel's, or Bloomingdale's because there they can find clothing, furniture, toys, and food in one store.

    Some people like the smaller stores of Greenwich Village or other areas when they are looking for an unusual present.

    Some streets have only one kind of stores. Bracelets (手镯) and rings shine in the windows of Canal Street, and wedding dresses fill the stores of Grant Street. There are streets for furs(皮大衣), and, in one area, there are 600 shops for antiques (古玩)! Fifth Avenue is the most famous place to shop, and it is usually the most expensive. There you can find the latest styles from Paris, Italy, or New York. You can spend thousands of dollars on Fifth Avenue, or you can just window shop and admire the sights for free.

    Now women are free to enter any career that attracts them, and working can bring them pride, confidence and independence. Working women make up nearly half of the U.S. workforce, and 51 percent of professional workers, like doctors, lawyers, nurses and accountants, are female. While climbing the career ladder can be rewarding, it often comes with one big disadvantage: weight gain!

    New research published this week in the International Journal of Obesity shows that working women are more likely to be overweight, and the more you work, the more pounds you're likely to pile on. Like many women, I work... a lot! As a self-employed nutrition communications specialist, I sit at my desk, in front of a computer, for hours on end. Sitting alone is one of the worst things you can do for your health, and it's directly linked to being overweight and increased fatness, so the fact that women in the workforce gain weight isn't that surprising. If you work, you have less time to move around. Obesity researchers are revealing many other ways that employment is harmful to your diet and waistline(腰围).

    In the International Journal of Obesity study, some 9,276 Australian women aged 45-50 had their body weight and employment status monitored for two years. Results? Those who worked more than 35 hours were likely to gain weight compared to those who worked fewer hours or were out of the workforce. What's more, the more hours a woman worked in a week, the more weight she gained.

    The authors of the Australian study attribute weight gain among working women to inactivity, lack of time for food preparation, more use of prepared foods, high levels of stress, lack of sleep and consuming more alcohol. I'll also add in travel, meals eaten out and working at night as other factors that I can find to make balancing work with a healthy diet a challenge.

    Parallel worlds exist and interact with our world, say physicists.

    Quantum mechanics (量子力学), though firmly tested, is so weird and anti-intuitive that physicist Richard Feynman once remarked, “I think I can safely say nobody understands quantum mechanics.” Attempts to explain some of the bizarre (奇异的) consequences of quantum theory have led to some mind-bending ideas, such as the Copenhagen interpretation and the many-worlds interpretation.

    Now there's a new theory on the block, called the “many interacting worlds” hypothesis (假设) (MIW), and the idea is just as profound as it sounds. The theory suggests not only parallel worlds exist, but that they interact with our world on the quantum level and are thus detectable. Though still speculative (推测的), the theory may help to finally explain some of the bizarre consequences inherent in quantum mechanics.

    The theory is a spinoff of the many-worlds interpretation in quantum mechanics—an assumption that all possible alternative histories and futures are real, each representing an actual, though parallel, world. One problem with the many-worlds interpretation, however, has been that it is fundamentally untestable, since observations can only be made in our world. Happenings in these proposed “parallel” worlds can thus only be imagined.

    MIW, however, says otherwise. It suggests that parallel worlds can interact on the quantum level, and in fact that they do.

    “The idea of parallel universes in quantum mechanics has been around since 1957,” explained Howard Wiseman, a physicist at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, and one of the physicists to come up with MIW. “In the well-known 'Many-Worlds Interpretation', each universe branches into a bunch of new universes every time a quantum measurement is made. All possibilities are therefore realized — in some universes the dinosaur-killing asteroid (小行星) missed Earth. In others, Australia was colonized by the Portuguese.”

    “But critics question the reality of these other universes, since they do not influence our universe at all,” he added. “On this score, our 'Many Interacting Worlds' approach is completely different, as its name implies.”

    Wiseman and colleagues have proposed that there exists “a universal force of repulsion between 'nearby'(i.e. similar) worlds, which tends to make them more dissimilar.” Quantum effects can be explained by factoring in this force, they propose.

    When asked about whether their theory might imply that humans could someday interact with other worlds, Wiseman said: “It's not part of our theory. But the idea of human interactions with other universes is no longer pure fantasy.”

    What might your life look like if you made different choices? Maybe one day you'll be able to look into one of these alternative worlds and find out.

    A good disguise keeps you hidden, right? Well, sometimes the best disguise is actually the most dazzling because research reveals that flashy metallic iridescence(金属彩虹色) can visually puzzle predators, which allows colorful prey to survive another day. Those surprising results appear in the journal Scientific Reports.

    Shining iridescent color, which changes depending on the angle from which it's viewed, is favored by everything from birds to beetles and blossoms to butterflies.

    "And in our research group we are of course interested in why this vivid metallic color is so widespread in nature." Karin Kjernsmo of the University of Bristol adds that in some cases the showy splashes of light are a sexual strategy. " Here I would like to point out that in some species, particularly those that display strong sexual dimorphism(雌雄两性), such as birds of paradise or some butterflies or fishes, the occurrence of iridescence is most likely driven by sexual selection. For example, in many of these cases it is the males that have these vivid iridescent colors and they use them in mate choice or they use them as a signal to attract mates."  But iridescence also shows up in situations where reproduction is not an issue. " So what we are studying now is whether natural selection imposed by predation(捕食行为) could explain the occurrence of iridescence in prey animals."

    The idea that eye­catching colors could be used as a cover­up isn't a new one." The father of camouflage theory, Abbott Thayer, really believed that iridescence should be categorized as a camouflage strategy. And he wrote in his famous lifework Concealing­Coloration in the Animal Kingdom, already in 1909, that 'brilliantly changeable or metallic colors are among the strongest factors in an animal's concealment'. And this sounds like a completely unreasonable thing to say, because how can colors that are both brilliant and changeable contribute to animal's concealment？"

    "In a similar way, we were asking whether iridescence, due to its changeability, could work as a form of camouflage by preventing shape recognition." Kjernsmo and her colleagues trained bumblebees to associate a particular shape—a circle or an oval—with a sugar reward. And they found that the bees, when given a choice, would preferentially visit the shape they knew to be sweet. But when the shapes were iridescent, the bees had trouble telling them apart. "It seemed that the strikingly iridescent surfaces on our targets visually broke up the otherwise recognizable shape of the targets, which made them hard to distinguish." As for making use of this method for hiding in plain sight, "Any practical applications is of course directly linked to any industry that has an interest in camouflage, that is how to conceal objects or make them more difficult to recognize." The researchers are currently conducting experiments with birds, which often prey on iridescent insects to see if it helps to have a bird's­eye view.