Some years ago, writing in my diary used to be a usual activity. I would return from school and spend the expected half hour recording the day's event, feelings, and impressions in my little blue diary. I did not really need to express my emotions by way of words, but I gained a certain satisfaction from seeing my experiences forever recorded on paper. After all, isn't accumulating memories a way of preserving the past?

    When I was thirteen years old, I went on a long journey on foot in a great valley, well-equipped with pens, a diary, and a camera. During the trip, I was busy recording every incident, name and place I came across. I felt proud to be spending my time productively, dutifully preserving for future generations a detailed description of my travels. On my last night there, I wandered out of my tent, diary in hand. The sky was clear and lit by the glare of the moon, and the walls of the valley looked threatening behind their screen of shadows. I automatically took out my pen….

    At that point, I understood that nothing I wrote could ever match or replace the few seconds I allowed myself to experience the dramatic beauty of the valley. All I remembered of the previous few days were the dull characterizations I had set down in my diary.

    Now, I only write in my diary when I need to write down a special thought or feeling. I still love to record ideas and quotations that strike me in books, or observations that are particularly meaningful. I take pictures, but not very often—only of objects I find really beautiful. I'm no longer blindly satisfied with having something to remember when I grow old. I realize that life will simply pass me by if I stay behind the camera, busy preserving the present so as to live it in the future.

    I don't want to wake up one day and have nothing but a pile of pictures and notes. Maybe I won't have as many exact representations of people and places; maybe I'll forget certain facts, but at least the experiences will always remain inside me. I don't live to make memories—I just live, and the memories form. themselves.

    A team of researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago found that too many kids are eating too much pizza and too many calories are doing harm to children's health.

    "There are a lot of takeaways from the study. But the biggest thing is that parents are serving their kids too much pizza," said Dr. William Dietz, one of the study's authors and the director of the Sumner M. Redstone Global Center for Prevention and Wellness at the Milken Institute of Public Health at the George Washington University.

    The researchers used data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which tracked the diets of more than 11,000 children and teenagers. Researchers figured how many children eat pizza in the United States, how often they eat it, and how much they eat when they do.

    Pizza, pretty alarmingly, is the second leading source of calories in the diets of America's children, next only to grain desserts, such as cookies and other sweets. On any given day, roughly 20 percent of all children aged 2 to 11 and adolescents aged 12 to 19 eat pizza. And when they do, they eat a lot of it. When children eat pizza, they eat roughly 400 calories, according to the study. For teenagers, it's upwards of 600 calories.

    All that is pretty problematic, according to Dietz largely because kids don't tend to balance the pizza slices with salads, vegetables and other more nutritional(有营养的) foodstuffs. Days on which children and teenagers eat pizza are not only associated with considerably higher intakes of fat, but also, quite simply, with more food: on average, children consume 84 extra calories on the days they eat pizza, while adolescents consume an extra 230 calories.

    "When you eat extra calories and don't compensate(抵偿) for them at another point of the day or week, it can lead to weight gain and even obesity." Dietz said.

    There is a Silver lining. Pizza consumption is still too high by nutrition standards, but it's lower than it used to be. Consumption(消费) fell by roughly 25 percent between 2007 and 2016, according to the study. Much of that has come at dinner where it's fallen by 40 percent for children and about 33 percent for teenagers. It's unclear whether the decline has been in connection with a growing concern over obesity, especially among the country's youth.

    But the drop in pizza consumption, while significant hasn't been big enough "It's a positive trend," Dietz said. "But we're not quite them yet."

    It's easy to see the appeal of pizza. It's cheap. Parents can buy a lot of pizza for not a lot of money. Besides, they can buy pizza from a chain shop, a mom-and-pop store or a grocery freezer. And it's universally loved. The estimated 3 billion pizza eaten each year in the United States is a proof of the food's unmatched popularity. Given how much the country loves pizza, what's to be done? Dietz suggests pizza with smaller serving sizes and healthier toppings(配料). "We're not suggesting that kids avoid pizza altogether." said Dietz. "But when parents serve it, it's important that they understand it's extremely caloric. They should serve smaller pizza, or at least smaller slices."

    The quick action of Nick helped five people escape a fire on Hope Road. Nick said he usually left his house about 5:30 a.m. to do morning exercises, but that day he decided to stay at home to get his daughter ready for school. As he looked at his neighbor's house, he realized that it was on fire. "I saw smoke and flames and ran over and started beating on the side of the house shouting, 'Your house is on fire! Your house is on fire!'" Nick remembered it was at about 9 a.m. that the firefighters put out the fire.

    Beverly Penny and her husband, Clark, along with their younger daughters, were sleeping in the living room, next to the kitchen, when they heard Nick beating on the walls. She opened the bedroom door and black smoke came in. She managed to get her kids out. Her dog tried to hide under the bed, but Penny caught it by the leg and threw it out of the door. However, chickens in one of the rooms weren't so lucky.

    Firefighters got the call at about 7:05 a.m. "When we arrived with our fire trucks, there were heavy flames outside on the house," Jerry said. He called Nick a hero, saying that without his quick responses(回应) the result could have been much worse. "The firefighters were fast," Nick said. "They arrived here within about three minutes."

    "They did a great job, and I can't thank them enough," Penny said, then looked at what remained in the house and shook her head as tears rolled down in her eyes. "Everything I have is gone. Luckily nobody was hurt in the fire." She said the fire could have been caused by an electrical problem. "We've been having problems with mice, so that we could have had something to do with it," she added.

    Many people like travelling, but they cannot take their dogs wherever they go. Some people let their dogs stay alone at home while others ask someone else to take care of their pets. If you're leaving your beloved pet at home for a holiday, it can turn into a bad experience. Luckily, you don't have to worry about your dogs any more because Rover can cover for you while you are on leave. Rover is the latest service to offer at­home dog boarding. It's a good alternative (替代物) to boarding your dog at a dog boarding kennel (狗舍) or your neighbour's house.

    The way Rover works is sort of like Airbnb. Dog owners browse the "search" section of the site or app for pet sitters, which can be organized by zip code and available dates. Information of pet sitters is provided, complete with many reviews, specific services and rates. Now Rover has over 25,000 pet sitters in more than 5,000 US cities. And they're all experienced pet sitters.

    After finding someone that meets your needs, just send messages to the pet sitter to arrange a meeting. Then, like Rover says, all that is left to do is relax! Rover's pet sitters are encouraged to send text and picture information throughout the day, and if there's a medical emergency, the site will send a vet. Besides, don't worry about a pet sitter who falls through, because someone else will soon take his or her place.

    Happy doggie, happy travels — that sounds good to us. To learn more about Rover, click here.

    Three men have had a big influence on modern sound and communication technologies. We started with the beginnings of computer-generated music.

Max Vernon Mathews

    Max Vernon Mathews has been called the father of computer music. He created electronic tools so that people could use computers, as musical instruments. He had a huge influence on the development of electronic music and how it is written, recorded and played. In 1957, Max wrote the first: computer program, Music, to enable a computer to create sound and play it back. The computer was so slow that it would have taken an hour to play the piece of music in seventeen seconds. For that reason, Mathews moved the work to a tape player, which could be sped up to play the music at a normal speed.

    Mathews continued creating other versions of the Music program. He became interested in how computers could help musicians outside recording studios. The Groove program he developed was the first computer program made for live performances.

Norio Ohga

    Sony Corporation official Norio Ohga helped to develop, the compact disc in the late 1970s.

    He pushed for CDs to be larger, and with a longer playing time. He wanted them to hold seventy-five minutes so that they could store all of Bcethoven's Ninth Symphony on one disc. This way, listeners could enjoy the musical work without any break. The compact disc changed the electronics industry and the way people listened to music.

Hubert Joseph Schlafly

    Hubert Joseph Schlafly was an electrical engineer who helped change the way actors, politicians and other people speak on television. In 1950, he and two other men developed the teleprompter. One co-worker, Fred Barton, was an actor. He had an idea for a tool that would help television actors read their lines without having to memorize them. The first teleprompter involved a person who turned a long piece of paper printed with tall letters. As the actor read the lines, another person would, move the paper ahead on the device. Later versions used television screens to show the words that were to be read.

    Being forgiving to yourself and others can protect against stress and the harm it does to mental health, according to a new study in the Journal of Health Psychology.

    Researchers looked at the effects of lifetime stress on a person's mental health, and how more forgiving people got along compared with people who weren't so forgiving. To do this, they asked 148 young adults to fill out questionnaires that assessed their levels of lifetime stress, their tendency to forgive and their mental and physical health.

    No surprise, people with greater exposure to stress had worse mental and physical health. But the researchers also discovered that if people were highly forgiving of both themselves and others, that characteristic alone almost removed the connection between stress and mental illness.

    "It's almost entirely erased—it's zero," says study author Toussaint. "If you don't have forgiving tendencies, you feel the immediate effects of stress in a severe way. You don't have anything to cushion you against that stress."

    How a forgiving personality protects a person from the influence of severe stress is hard to determine. The researchers infer that people who are more forgiving may adopt better skills to deal with stress, or their reaction to major stressors(压力源)may be slow.

    Though more research is needed to fully understand the benefits of being more forgiving, Toussaint believes"100％"that forgiveness can be learned. His own previous research has shown that saying a short prayer on forgiveness can help people take the edge off. "I think most people want to feel good and forgiveness offers you the opportunity to do that," he says.