At 27, after serving in World War II, I dreamed of owning a piece of land. So I moved from central Illinois to Shelbina, Missouri, and bought 236 acres for $6,000. The land was situated on a dirt road and was half farmland and half trees, with an old house that had no running water or electricity. Obviously, it was not what you'd call a perfect farm. But it was mine.

    I was alone for the first time in my life, and I found it liberating. My days were filled from dawn until dusk with plowing and planting corn. Dinnertime came and went, and I barely remembered to eat.

    I wouldn't say I was a great success at farming in Missouri. However, when I went to the store to buy some tools, I met a nice woman named Claudette working behind the counter. I also ran into her at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Shelbina each week. I found out later that her manager kept asking her about “that tall boy from Illinois living out in the country in an old house with no water, no electricity and no housekeeper.”

    Claudette and her sister soon visited my farm and put up some curtains. To show my appreciation, I took Claudette out for a ride in my truck. We married in 1954 and have now been together for more than 62 years!

    I later sold the Missouri farm for a $3,500 profit and bought 40 acres in Illinois. For many reasons, buying the Missouri farm was a good idea. I will always cherish memories of owning the farm and meeting my beloved.

    The Nazca Lines are a series of large ancient geoglyphs (地画) in the Nazca Desert, in southern Peru. It is ranging from geometric patterns to drawings of different animals and stylized human-like forms. The ancient lines can only be truly taken in from high in the air, leaving generations puzzled as to how these precise works could have been completed long before the documented invention of human flight.

    The Lines were first spotted when commercial airlines began flying across the Peruvian desert in the 1920,s. Who built them and what was their purpose? Are they roads, star pointers，maybe even a gigantic map? If the people who lived here 2,000 years ago had only a simple technology, how did they manage to construct such precise figures? Did they have a plan? These markings are like a vast puzzle.

    The Nazca Lines are the most outstanding group of geoglyphs in the world. There are also huge geoglyphs in Egypt, Malta，United States (Mississippi and California), Chile，Holivia and in other countries. But the Nazca geoglyphs, because of their numbers， characteristics, dimensions and cultural continuity as they were made and remade throughout a certain history period, form the most impressive archeological (考古学的) group.

    The Nazca plain is unique for its ability to preserve the markings upon it, due to the combination of the climate (one of the driest on Earth, with only twenty minutes of rainfall per year) and the flat, stony ground which minimizes the effect of the wind at ground level. With no dust or sand to cover the plain and little rain or wind to erode (腐蚀) it, lines drawn here tend to stay drawn. These factors, combined with the existence of lighter-colored subsoil beneath the desert surface, provide a vast writing pad that is suited to the artist who wants to leave his mark eternal.

    More and more comment(评论) sections are being shut down online.

    Autumn Phillips had had enough. On August 19, the executive editor of the Quad-City Times in Iowa, and Illinois, US visited her website, qutimes. com, and saw a story about a man who had been shot to death. When she got to the readers' comments section at the end, she was shocked by what she saw. Below the story was a growing string of comments—a racist remark about democratic( 民主的) voters, a negative comment about police...So Phillips decided to do something she had been thinking about for a long time: she shut down the comment section.

    Phillips was not alone in making such a move. Last week, NPR announced it too was closing its online comments section. The decisions don't mean that the news outlets are no longer interested in what their audiences are thinking. Both stressed their eagerness to hear from readers and listeners on social networks. But both agreed that comments had deviated from their original intention. And so they had.

    In the early days of digital journalism, comments were seen as a key part of the new media, a wonderful opportunity for strengthening the dialogue between news producers and their audiences. It was a welcome change, given that for long many news organizations were far too separated from their readers. Much more back and forth conversation seemed like healthy and welcome evolutions. Sadly, that's not the way things turned out. Rather than a place for exchanging ideas, comments sections became the home of ugly name-calling, racism and anti-women language. Besides their poisonous quality, comments seem out of place today.

    “Since we made the announcement, I've received an outpouring of responses from our readers,”she says. “I've heard from parents whose children were hurt by our online comments. I've heard from people who said they wouldn't send in letters to the editor because they were attacked so fiercely by comments, and it wasn't worth it.”

    When you go to the doctor, you like to come away with a prescription．It makes you feel better to know you will get some medicine. But the doctor knows that medicine is not always needed. Sometimes all a sick person needs is some reassurance that all will be well. In such cases the doctor may prescribe a placebo.

    A placebo is a sugar pill, a harmless shot, or ail empty capsule. Even though they have no medicine in them, these things seem to make people well. The patient thinks it is medicine and begins to get better. How does this happen?

    The study of the placebo opens up new knowledge about the way the human body can heal itself. It is as if there was a doctor in each of us. The doctor will heal the body for us if we let it. But it is not yet known just how the placebo works to heal the body. Some people say it works because the human mind fools itself. These people say that if the mind is fooled into thinking it got medicine, then it will act as if it did, and the body will feel better.

    Placebos do not always work. The success of this treatment seems to rest a lot with the relationship between the patient and the doctor. If the patient has a lot of trust in the doctor and if the doctor really wants to help the patient, then the placebo is more likely to work. So in a way, the doctor is the most powerful placebo of all.

    A placebo can also have bad effects. If patients expect a bad reaction to medicine, then they will also show a bad reaction to the placebo. This would seem to show that a lot of how you react to medicine is in your mind rather than in your body. Some doctors still think that if the placebo can have bad effects it should never be used. They think there is still not enough known about it.

    The strange power of the placebo does seem to suggest that the human mind is stronger than we think it is. There are people who say you can heal your body by using your mind. And the interesting thing is that even people who swear this is not possible have been healed by a placebo．

    It has long been thought that elephants rely on their large ears and bathing in rivers to stay cool in hot climates. New research, however, has showed that the world's largest land animals have a secret trick of controlling their body temperatures.

    Scientists have long been puzzled by temperature regulation(调节)in elephants. Generally, animals with large bodies tend to hold more heat because, compared to their size, they have a small surface area for heat to escape from. Elephants, with their heavy­weight frames, would appear to be at a disadvantage in the heat of their African and Asian habitats, especially because they have thick fur to protect them from bushes and trees.

    Scientists thought that these creatures, which weigh up to 13 tons when fully­grown, grow large ears to help them stay cool. The skin on the ears is thinner, so blood which flows into them cools down more easily. But findings by researchers at two universities in Vienna have showed that elephants are also able to cool down by increasing the blood flow to skin patches(斑) in other parts of their bodies.

    The researchers studied six African elephants at Vienna Zoo as they moved between outdoor and indoor environments to see how the temperature on their skin surface would change. They found up to 15 “hot spots” all over an elephant's body surface, in addition to large patches on the ears. The study shows how these patches expand as the air temperature increases and more blood flows nearer to the skin surface. Other experiments show that elephants in the wild use the same “windows” to control their body temperature.

    Elephants have two additional ways to stay cool: flapping(拍打)the ears and bathing. Together with these tricks, the skin hot spots allow the animals to keep their body temperature always at about 36 degrees—one degree less than humans'.

    As scientists in the Netherlands tried to figure out how to build a super flying robot, they learned from one of nature s flyers: the humble fruit fly(果蝇).And by building this robot, they've gained new insights into how the fly carries out one of its dangerous tasks.

    The robot is called the DelFly Nimble Its wingspan(冀展)is about a foot wide. It has four wings that can beat at 17 times per second, which appear very delicate because they're made of the same material as space blankets.

    In the previous designs, they always had a tail, like a traditional airplane tail, said the robots main designer Matej Karasek. He's based at the Micro Air Vehicle Laboratory at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, and he and his colleagues published their findings on Thursday in Science

    “In the previous generations", he said, "flapping wings drove the robot forward while the tail helped to guide and stabilize it. But now the DelFly Nimble is completely controlled by the wings. The challenge then was actually combine the control into the wing movement, and that's what we achieved, Karasek said

    In the latest generation. the wings can each move individually or rotate(旋转)around the body of the robot in order to maximize the machine s agility(灵活 ) The robot can remain in one place in the air for about five minutes on a full battery or fly for more than a kilometer"， Karasek said, "And because the scientists are controlling all the movements, they can use the robot to learn more about how fruit flies actually carry out their dangerous tasks, which has caught the attention of biologists.”