Every pet owner loves his pet. There is no argument here.

    But when we asked our readers whether they would clone their beloved animals, the responses were split almost down the middle. Of the 228 readers who answered it, 108 would lone, 111 would not and nine weighed each side without offering an opinion.

    Clearly, from readers' response, this is an issue that reaches deeply into both the joy and eventual sadness of owning a pet. It speaks, as well, to people's widely differing expectations over the developing scientific procedure.

    Most of the respondents who favored the idea strongly believed it would produce at least a close copy of the original; many felt the process would actually return an exact copy. Those on the other side, however, held little hope a clone could never truly recreate a pet, many simply didn't wish to go against the natural law of life and death.

    Both sides expressed equal love for their animals. More than a few respondents owned “the t dog/cat in the World”. They thought of their pets as their “best friend”, ''a member of the family,” “the light of my life.” They told moving stories of pets' heroism, intelligence and selfless devotion.

Little wonders the loss is so disturbing—and the cloning so attractive. “People become very lose to their animals, and the loss can be just as hard to bear as when a friend or family member dies,” says Gary Kowalski, author of Goodbye, Friend: Healing Wisdom for Anyone Who Has Ever Lost a Pet. “For me, cloning feels like an attempt to turn death away... It's understandable. Death is always painful. It's difficult to deal with. It's hard to accept.”

    But would cloning reduce the blow? This question seemed to be at the heart of this problem.

    One day an old woman was traveling alone in the mountains. Suddenly she saw something shining in the stream. When she came close, she found it was a precious （珍贵的） stone. She put the stone into her bag and went on with her trip.

    The next day the old woman met a young man, who was also a traveler in the mountains. The young man looked very hungry, so the old woman opened her bag to share her food. The hungry traveler saw the precious stone and asked carefully, “The stone is beautiful. Would you like to give it to me?”

    “Sure. Why not?” the woman said, and handed the stone to him.

    The young man left happily with the stone. He knew it was worth enough to give him security for a lifetime. But a few days later he came back to return the stone to the woman.

    “I've been thinking,” he said. “I know how valuable the stone is, but I give it back and hope that you can give me something even more precious. Give me what you have within your bag.”

    The woman opened her bag. It was almost empty. She looked at the young man and smiled, “I have nothing special in my bag, but I do have something precious — the joy of giving!”

    The young man felt ashamed and left silently.

    Amazon.com has received a patent (专利) right to send its products to customers by drone planes. The company is the largest US-based online seller of products. It delivers those products to customers by mail and other services. Now, the company has received a patent for its planned drone delivery system.

    In March, federal officials allowed Amazon to test its drone delivery plan. But even with a patent and the ability of drones to make deliveries, it does not appear that the company will put its new delivery system in place any time soon.

    The US Patent Office published the document. It describes Amazon's plans to use GPS to deliver products to homes and to wherever people are. The drone will use a customer's mobile device—usually a smartphone—to avoid hitting people or buildings and to find a secure area to land. The company wants to deliver products within 30 minutes after people ordering them on its website.

    However, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is worried about the safety. Although it allowed Amazon to test the system, the agency said the operators must be able to see the planes. That greatly limits (限制) the delivery area.

    Loretta Alkalay is a professor at the Vaughn College of Aeronautics and Technology in New York. Although Amazon is not yet offering drone delivery, Professor Alkalay says it will not be long before it does. She says there are worries that the drones will hit buildings or people, or that the products and drones will be stolen or damaged by people on purpose. But she says that is because many people believe the drones would only deliver the products to the front door of a house. "However, it is possible that homes will one day have special areas on their roofs designed to receive product deliveries," she adds.

    Humans are social animals. They live in groups all over the world. As these groups of people live apart from other groups, over the years and centuries they develop their own habits and ideas, which are different from other cultures. One important particular side of every culture is how its people deal with time.

    Time is not very important in nonindustrial societies. The Nuer people of East Africa, for example, do not even have a word TIME that is in agreement with the abstract thing we call time. The daily lives of the people of such nonindustrial societies are likely to be patterned around their physical needs and natural events rather than around a time schedule(时间表)based on the clock. They cook and eat when they are hungry and sleep when the sun goes down. They plant crops during the growing seasons and harvest them when the crops are ripe. They measure time not by a clock or calendar(日历), but by saying that an event takes place before or after some other event Frequently such a society measures days in terms of "sleeps" or longer periods in terms of "moons." Some cultures, such as the Eskimos of Greenland measure seasons according to the migration of certain animals.

    Some cultures which do not have a written language or keep written records have developed interesting ways of "telling time". For example, when several Australian aborigines want to plan an event for a future time, one of them places a stone on a cliff or in a tree. Each day the angle of the sun changes slightly. In a few days, the rays of the sun strike the stone in a certain way. When this happens, the people see that the agreed-upon time has arrived and the event can take place.

    In contrast(成对比), exactly correct measurement of time is very important in modern, industrialized societies. This is because industrialized societies require the helpful efforts of many people in order to work. For a factory to work efficiently(well, quickly and without waste), for example, all of the workers must work at the same time. Therefore, they must know what time to start work in the morning and what time they may go home in the afternoon. Passengers must know the exact time that an airplane will arrive or depart. Students and teachers need to know when a class starts and ends. Stores must open on time in order to serve their customers. Complicated(复杂的)societies need clocks and calendars. Thus, we can see that if each person worked according to his or her own schedule, a complicated society could hardly work at all.

    Older women who walk a little over three kilometers each day might live longer than less active women of the same age, a new study suggests.

    Many Americans hoping to stay healthy set a daily goal of 10, 000 steps, or about eight kilometers. They often have this goal because they are wearing electronic devices which set that target, note researchers in the United States. Their findings appeared recently in the publication JAMA Internal Medicine.

    But it is not clear how much intensity(强度)or speed matter when counting the health benefits of every step, the researchers write. They add that 10,000 steps per day might not be the right goal for everyone.

    For the study, researchers observed 17,000 women, all in their early 70s. They asked the women to wear accelerometers for at least four days. Accelerometers are small devices that measure the number of steps and the intensity of movement. The researchers followed up with the women much later, around 4. 3 years later, on average. Since the beginning of the study, 504 women had died. Compared to women who took no more than 2, 718 steps daily, the women who took at least 4,363 steps per day were 41 percent less likely to die.

    "Even a modest amount of steps is associated with lower death rates," said I-Min Lee, the lead writer of a report on the study. "The rate of stepping did not matter in these older women: it was the number of steps that mattered.

    The study had a few limitations. For example, the researchers only measured women's movements once, at the start of the study period. It is possible that the women's behaviors changed over time. Still, the results are "good news for older adults who may have difficulty walking at faster paces, "said Keith Diaz, a researcher at Columbia University. He was not involved in the study.

    "Any walking is better than nothing," Diaz said by email. "With even small amounts of walking, your risk of death will be sharply reduced "For those who have difficulty walking, other research shows that any form of aerobic activity provides health benefits," he added. "Swimming, bicycling or any form of activity that is continuous in nature will provide health benefits.

    I must have always known reading was very important because the first memories I have as a child deal with books. There was not one night that I don't remember mom reading me a storybook by my bedside. I was extremely inspired by the wonderful way the words sounded.

    I always wanted to know what my mom was reading. Hearing mom say, "I can't believe what's printed in the newspaper this morning," made me want to grab it out of her hands and read it myself. I wanted to be like my mom and know all of the things she knew. So I carried around a book, and each night, just to be like her, I would pretend to be reading.

    This is how everyone learned to read. We would start off with sentences, then paragraphs, and then stories. It seemed an unending journey, but even as a six-year-old girl I realized that knowing how to read could open many doors. When mom said, "The C-A-N-D-Y is hidden on the top shelf," I knew where the candy was. My progress in reading raised my curiosity, and I wanted to know everything. I often found myself telling my mom to drive more slowly, so that I could read all of the road signs we passed.

    Most of my reading through primary, middle and high school was factual reading. I read for knowledge, and to make A's on my tests. Sometimes, I would read a novel that was assigned, but I didn't enjoy this type of reading. I liked facts, things that are concrete. I thought anything abstract left too much room for argument.

    Now that I'm growing and the world I once knew as being so simple is becoming more complex, I find myself needing a way to escape. By opening a novel, I can leave behind my burdens and enter into a wonderful and mysterious world where I am now a new character. In these worlds I can become anyone. I don't have to write down what happened or what technique the author was using when he or she wrote this. I just read to relax.

    We're taught to read because it's necessary for much of human understanding. Reading is an important part of my life. Reading satisfies my desire to keep learning. And I've found that the possibilities that lie within books are limitless.