Have your parents ever inspected your room to see if you cleaned it properly? Imagine having your entire houses, garage, and yard inspected at any time -- with no warning. Inspections were a regular part of lighthouse (灯塔) living, and a keeper's reputation depended on results. A few times each year, an inspector arrived to look over the entire light station.  The inspections were supposed to be a surprise, but keeper sometimes had advance notice.
           Once lighthouses had telephones, keepers would call each other to warn that the inspector was approaching. After boats began flying special flags nothing the inspector aboard, the keeper's family made it a game to see who could notice the boat first. As soon as someone spotted the boat, everyone would do last-minute tidying and change into fancy clothes. The keeper then scurried to put on his dress uniform and cap. Children of keepers remember inspectors wearing white gloves to run their fingers over door frames and  windowsills looking for dust.
           Despite the serious nature of inspections, they resulted in some funny moments. Betty Byrnes remembered when her mother did not have
 time to wash all the dishes before an inspection. At the time, people did not have dishwashers in their homes. In an effort to clean up quickly, Mrs. Byrnes tossed all the dishes into a big bread pan, covered them with a cloth and stuck them in the oven. If the inspector opened the oven door, it would look like bread was baking. he never did.
          One day, Glenn Furst's mother put oil on the kitchen floor just before the inspector entered their house. Like floor wax, the oil made the
 floors shiny and helped protect the wood. This time, though, she used a little too much oil. When the inspector extended his hand to
greet Glenn's mother, he slipped on the freshly oiled surface. "He came across that floor waving his arms like a young bird attempting
its first flight," Glenn late wrote. After he steadied himself, he shook Glenn's mother's hand, and the inspection continued as though
 nothing had happened.

    At least five wolves, including one female, have returned to Denmark for the first time in two centuries, a zoologist who has obtained DNA evidence said on Thursday.

    The wolves came from Germany to settle in western Denmark's agricultural region, the least densely populated in the Scandinavian country. Peter Sunde, a scientist at the University of Aarhus, told AFP the wolves must have walked more than 500km. "We think these are young wolves rejected by their families who are looking for new hunting grounds," the researcher added. Scientists have established a genetic profile from the faeces(f粪便) of five wolves - four males and one female - but there could be more. Sunde said researchers had suspected since 2012 that wolves had entered Denmark. "Now we have evidence [including] that there's one female," signalling the possibility of giving birth this spring, he said.

    Proof was also established through the wolves' fingerprints and video surveillance(监视,监督) showed their location, which scientists refuse to reveal out of fear that it will attract hunters."We're following that. The wolf is an animal we're not allowed to hunt so we must protect it," said Henrik Hagen Olesen, spokesperson at the Danish Environmental Protection Agency.Exterminated by hunters, wolves had been completely extinct in Denmark since the beginning of the nineteenth century.

    In other Nordic countries with a higher wolf population, culling(选择性宰杀) the species, protected by the Bern Convention, is under a fierce debate between inhabitants, farmers, hunters, the government, the European Union and wildlife activists.

    A couple of weeks ago, a few friends and I had an opportunity to attend a dear friend's wedding in New York. After the wedding and reception, rather accidentally four of us gathered in a hotel room and began to explore the deeper meaning of life and death. What does it mean to live truly? If we are all getting closer to death, is all the material accumulation worth it? It is not exactly the type of conversations one has at a wedding.

    While the answers varied from person to person, I was left with more questions than answers and a feeling of gratefulness to be surrounded by friends who were asking the “right” questions. As the clock kept ticking past 3 a.m., one of the roommates suggested we watch a short film titled “Last Days of Zach Sobiech”. The film is about a teenager's journey through the last days of his incurable illness. The film brought up a lot of mixed emotions but one quote that stood out for me was Zach's simple explanation of happiness, “What makes one happy is seeing someone else smile because you put it there.” By 4 a.m. , there was this energy in the room that had to be shared! With a few packages of post-it notes, we hit the halls of the hotel. We decided to leave short inspirational words on guests' doors, so when they opened their doors few hours later a smile would turn up.

    We ended up sticking post-it notes on all the doors until we ran out of them. The note on the door of the newly-weds properly said, “Where there is love, there is life.”

    Have you ever been afraid to talk back when you were treated unfairly? Have you ever bought something just because the salesman talked you into it? Many people are afraid to speak out for their rights. Dr Robert Albert, author of Stand Up, Speak Out, and Talk Back thinks it's because their self-respect is low.

    But Albert and other scientists are doing something to help people help themselves. They offer "assertiveness training" courses A. T. for short. In the A.T. Course people learn that they have a right to be themselves. They learn to speak out and feel good about doing so. They learn to help themselves without hurting other people.

In one way, learning to speak out is to get rid of fear. A group taking an A. T. Course will help the shy person to lose his fear. But A. T.uses an even stronger motive— he needs to share. The shy person speaks out in the group because he wants to tell how he feels. Whether or not you speak up for yourself depends on your self-respect. If someone you face is more "important" than you, you may feel less of a person. You start to doubt your answers to problems. You can get to feel good about yourself. And once you do you can learn to speak out.

    Madame Marie Curie famously won two Nobel Prizes, but many other women have also been awarded the prize, too. Here are their stories.

    Selma Lagerlof

    Selma Lagerlof was a Swedish author and teacher. She published her first novel, Gosta Berling's Saga, at the age of 33. She was the first female writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature which she was awarded in 1909. Additionally, she was the first female to be granted membership in the Swedish Academy.

    Gerty Theresa Cori

    Gerty and her husband, Carl Cori, met in Prague and lived in Austria before immigrating to the United States in 1922, where the two medical doctors worked together at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in New York. In 1947, Gerty and Carl were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, making Gerty Cori the first woman to hold the honor.

    Maria Goeppert-Mayer

    In 1942, Maria Goeppert-Mayer joined the Manhattan Project. From there, she moved on to Los Alamos National Laboratory, then to Argonne National Laboratory, where Goeppert-Mayer developed the nuclear shell model. For this, she shared the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics with J. Hans D. Jensen and Eugene Paul Wigner.

    Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin

    Dorothy Hodgkin's mother encouraged her love of science as a child, and at age 18, she began studying chemistry at a women-only Oxford college. Her work on mapping vitamin B12 earned her the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964.

    In many developed countries, people who have high degrees begin to work longer than those who don't. About 65% of American men aged 62－74 with a professional degree are in the workforce (劳动人口), compared with 32% of men who only finish high school. This gap is part of a deepening divide between the well­educated wealthy and the unskilled poor. Rapid technological advance has raised the incomes of the highly skilled while squeezing those of the unskilled. The consequences, for individuals and society, are profound(意义深远的).

    The world is facing an astonishing rise in the number of old people, and they will live longer than ever before. Over the next 20 years the global population of those aged 65 or more will almost double, from 600 million to 1.1 billion. The experience of the 20th century, when greater longevity (长寿) translated into more years in retirement rather than more years at work, has persuaded many observers that this shift (变化) will lead to slower economic growth, while the swelling (渐增的) ranks of pensioners will create government budget problems.

    Policies are partly responsible. Many European governments have abandoned policies that used to encourage people to retire early. Even the better­off must work longer to have a comfortable retirement. But the changing nature of work also plays a big role. Pay has risen sharply for the highly educated, and those people continue to reap (获得) rich rewards into old age because these days the educated elderly are more productive than the preceding (先前的) generation. Technological change may well reinforce (强化) that shift: the skills that complement (补充) computers, from management know­how to creativity, do not necessarily decline with age.