You Who Came FromThe Star and The Heirs (继承者们) have been subjects of hot online discussions throughout Asia. Besides, the book, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, read by the hero You Who Came From The Star was a hard to get item on Amazon for a while.

    The two TV programs have several common elements (因素): a tall, handsome, and rich hero who loves the heroine blindly and always protects her, and an equally handsome man madly in love with the same woman . Both programs describe the purity of love, which is expressed through a kiss or a warm hug. Perhaps that's the secret of their success: perhapspeople still like Cinderella type stories.

    The widening wealth gap is a matter of social concern both in South Korea and China, and the challenges that young people face in their hope for a better life might have caused many ordinary girls to dream of marrying rich, caring men. This is precisely what the popular South Korean TV drams describe. In fact,South Korean TV dramas are tailored to meet the market's demands.

    Many netizens evensaid at an earlier time that South Korean TV dramas had become popular because of their stereotyped (模式化的) themes: traffic accidents, cancer and other incurable diseases. But all that has changed with the success of You Who CameFrom The Star and The Heirs, which Chinese directors can use as examples, aswell as inspiration, to improve their productions.

    People can be addicted to different things, e.g. alcohol, drugs, certain foods, or even television. People who have such an addiction are compulsive, i.e they have a very powerful psychological need that they feel they must satisfy. According to psychologists, many people are compulsive spenders; they feel that they must spend money. This compulsion, like most others, is irrational-impossible to explain reasonably. For compulsive spenders who buy on credit, charge accounts are even more exciting than money. In other words, compulsive spenders feel that with credit, they can do anything. Their pleasure in spending enormous amounts is actually greater than the pleasures that they get from the things they buy.

    There is even a special psychology of bargain hunting. To save money, of course, most people look for sales, low prices, and discounts. Compulsive bargain hunters, however, often buy things that they don't need just because they are cheap. They want to believe that they are helping their budgets, but they are really playing an exciting game: when they can buy something for less than other people, they feel that they are winning. Most people, experts claim, have two reasons for their behavior: a good reason for the things that they do and the real reason.

    It is not only scientists, of course, who understand the psychology of spending habits, but also business people. Stores, companies and advertisers use psychology to increase business: they consider people's need for love, power, or influence, their basic values, their beliefs and opinions, and so on in their advertising and sales methods.

    Psychologists often use a method called “behavior therapy” to help individuals solve their personal problems. In the same was, they can help people who feel that they have problems with money.

    One day when I was 12, my mother gave me an order: I was to walk to the public library, and borrow at least one book for the summer. This was one more weapon for her to defeat my strange problem—inability to read.

    In the library, I found my way into the “Children's Room.” I sat down on the floor and pulled a few books off the shelf at random. The cover of a book caught my eye. It presented a picture of a beagle. I had recently had a beagle, the first and only animal companion I ever had as a child. He was my secret sharer, but one morning, he was gone, given away to someone who had the space and the money to care for him. I never forgot my beagle.

    There on the book's cover was a beagle which looked identical (相同的) to my dog. I ran my fingers over the picture of the dog on the cover. My eyes ran across the title, Amos, the Beagle with a Plan. Unknowingly, I had read the title. Without opening the book, I borrowed it from the library for the summer.

    Under the shade of a bush, I started to read about Amos. I read very, very slowly with difficulty. Though pages were turned slowly, I got the main idea of the story about a dog who, like mine, had been separated from his family and who finally found his way back home. The dog was my dog, and I was the little boy in the book. At the end of the story, my mind continued the final scene of reunion, on and on, until my own lost dog and I were, in my mind, running together.

    My mother's call returned me to the real world. I suddenly realized something: I had read a book, and I had loved reading that book. Everyone knew I could not read. But I had read it. Books could be incredibly wonderful and I was going to read them.

    I never told my mother about my “miraculous” (奇迹般的) experience that summer, but she saw a slow but remarkable improvement in my classroom performance during the next year. And years later, she was proud that her son had read thousands of books, was awarded a PhD in literature, and authored his own books, articles, poetry and fiction. The power of the words was held.

    See our editors' top 5 picks in print books and Kindle books, and discover our editors' picks for the best books of the year.

    # 1 Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann

    In Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grami revisits a shocking series of crimes in which dozens of people were murdered in cold blood. Based on years of research and new evidence, the book is a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction.

    Kindle: $14.99 Hardcover: $ 17.37 Paperback: $15.36

    # 2 Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

    Little Fires Everywhere explores the weight of secrets, the nature of art and identity, and the fierce pull of motherhood and the danger of believing that following the rules can avoid disaster,

    Little Fires Everywhere is the perfect gift for the holidays!

    Kindle: $13.99 Hardcover: $ 20.96 Paperback: $ 12.95

    # 3 Bear Town by Fredrik Backman

    It is a novel about a forgotten town bothered by scandal and the amateur hockey team that might just change everything into a better place. Winning a junior ice hockey championship might mean everything to the residents of Beartown.

Kindle: $10.99 Hardcover: $ 12.95

    # 4 Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

    Profoundly intimate and powerfully inventive, Exit West tells an unforgettable story of love, loyalty, and courage that is both completely of our time and for all time.

Kindle: $12.99 Hardcover: $ 15.73 Paperback: $11

    # 5 Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Harari

    Yuval Noah Harari, author of the international phenomenon Sapiens, returns with an equally original and attractive book, turning his focus toward humanity's future, and our quest to upgrade humans into gods.

    Kindle: $17.99 Hardcover: $ 28.95 Paperback: $22.99

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    Metal-organic frameworks(MOFs) are compounds that are set to solve some tough challenges: producing water in the desert, removing greenhouse gases from the air and storing dangerous gases more safely.

    The Arizona desert is really dry. Anyone stuck in it without water would die from dehydration (脱水) within three days. Unless, that is, they had one of Omar Yaghi's next-generation water harvesters. Although daytime humidity(湿度)is only about 10 per cent, this rises to 40 per cent at night, which means there's enough water in the atmosphere to support life — if it can be transformed into liquid form.

    That's exactly what Yaghi's device does. It's a box about the size of a small microwave oven designed to suck the humidity from the air at night and turn it into drinking water the next day using only the heat of the sun as its power source. What makes it work is a special material called a metal-organic framework (MOF), which at normal temperatures attracts water molecules (分子) onto its surface of its internal pores(细孔). Warm it up and the water is released, each harvest producing one-third of a cup of pure drinking water.

    "With further improvements, a device, the size of a washing machine, could produce enough water for the basic needs of a household," says Yaghi, a chemist at the University of California. One-third of the world's population lacks safe drinking water; for them such a device could be a lifesaver.

    These crystalline cluster(结晶群)of metals, such as aluminum or magnesium, linked by organic molecules can be made into materials with an extremely high absorption ability, attracting specific molecules to their surface. In this way, MOFs cling to a variety of liquids and gases.

MOFs work thanks to their unique structure—large quantities of nanometer-sized internal spaces. In fact one MOF has so many pores that they would cover an area as large as six football fields. MOFs are also extremely stable light and have many different uses: their molecular structure can be varied to attract specific molecules, such as water, and their pores can be designed to best store them. Adding a small amount of heat or pressure causes the MOF to release what it is holding. More than 70,000 different MOFs have been produced to date for various applications.