When my friend Lesa was diagnosed(诊断) with cancer, another friend and I went to the hospital to spend some time with her. We bought her a small toy and  named him Lemon－Aide. We gave Lemon－Aide to Lesa and told her he was to go with her to all of her treatments to remind her that we were thinking of her and caring about her even though we could not always be with her. When the treatments were completed, she said when someone else needed him she would pass him along.

    A few months later，much to my surprise, it was me that she passed him to. Lemon－Aide went with me to all of my treatments.

    One day while waiting for my doctor I decided we could market the idea to fight cancer. Lesa thought it was a great idea so we founded the organization that came to be known as Lemon－Aide' s Friends, Inc. We designed our organization to remind people fighting cancer that there are people who love and care about them all the time. Today we have totally 5013 volunteers. The money raised is donated to cancer patients who do not have insurance. The physicians on our Board of Advisors determine how and where our money is donated.

    Lemon－Aide is for men, women, and children of all ages and to date has been sent to 34 states and 33 countries to provide smiling support for people fighting cancer. When life gave us lemons we made Lemon－Aide, a soft smiling toy that represents love, support, and encouragement.

    Languages have been coming and going for thousands of years, but in recent times there has been less coming and a lot more going. When the world was still populated by hunter-gatherers , small tightly knit (联系) groups developed their own patterns of speech independent of each other. Some language experts believe that 10,000 years ago, when the world had just five to ten million people, they spoke perhaps 1,200 languages between them.

    Soon afterwards, many of those people started settling down to become farmers, and their languages too became more settled and fewer in number. In recent centuries, trade, industrialization, the development of the nation-state and the spread of universal compulsory education, especially globalization and better communications in the past few decades, all have caused many languages to disappear, and dominant languages such as English, Spanish and Chinese are increasingly taking over.

    At present, the world has about 6,800 languages. The distribution of these languages is hugely uneven. The general rule is that mild zones have relatively few languages, often spoken by many people, while hot, wet zones have lots, often spoken by small numbers. Europe has only around 200 languages; the Americas about 1,000; Africa 2,400; and Asia and the Pacific perhaps 3200, of which Papua New Guinea alone accounts for well over 800. The median number (中位数) of speakers is a mere 6,000, which means that half the world's languages are spoken by fewer people than that.

    Already well over 400 of the total of 6,800 languages are close to extinction (消亡), with only a few elderly speakers left. Pick, at random, Busum in Cameroon (eight remaining Speaker), Chiapaneco in Mexico (150), Lipan Apache in the United States (two or three) or Wadjigu in Australia (one, with a question-mark) none of these seems to have much chance of survival.

    As the weather gets colder, we start wearing jackets, and most of us stop thinking about the sun. But the sun's rays can be just as harmful when it's cold and cloudy outside. "Any exposed area of your body can still get sunburned," Dr. Apple Bodemer, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Live Science.

    Whether you spend a day on the slopes, skating on a pond or clearing snow out of your driveway, your face is still getting exposed to the sun's radiation in the form of ultraviolet (紫外线) (UV) light, which can go deep into your skin cells causing DNA damage, according to Bodemer.

    The sun's long ultraviolet A (UVA) waves can cause earlier aging, sunspots and wrinkles, while its short ultraviolet B (UVB) rays are known for causing skin reddening and burns.

    Skin damage caused by UV exposure increases over time. More exposure to radiation contributes to more severe damage, even skin cancer. In addition, snow and ice can also make sun damage worse. They reflect up to 80 percent of UV rays reaching the ground. That means you get hit from both the sky and the ground. And skiers and snowboarders increase their risk of getting sunburned even more because UV exposure increases at higher altitudes.

    "Generally, the biggest factor for sun-sensitivity is how pale your skin is," he said. "But, the reality is that even the darkest individual can get sun damage."

    Luckily, the solution for protecting your skin is simple: Wear sunscreen every day. Rigel recommended using sunscreen with a sun protection factor (SPF) of at least 30, and going higher at high altitudes. As a rule of thumb, SPF 30 will block 97 percent of UVB rays, SPF 50 blocking 98 percent, and SPF 100 blocking 99 percent. Whatever kind of sunscreen you use, it's important to apply SPF about once every 2 hours.

    Rigel also suggested sunscreens with "broad spectrum (光谱)"—to protect against both UVB and UVA rays—as well as sunscreens that are water resistant for up to 80 minutes. That way, you can go about your day without it wearing off too quickly.

    The European Union(EU) is an organization of European countries. The countries are independent and are governed in different ways. In the United Kingdom, for example, the head of state is a king or queen. In France, on the other hand, the head of state is a president. But each of them sends representatives(代表)to European Parliament, which has some control over what happens in each of the member countries.

    The idea of the EU began in the 1950s. The first members were France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Italy. Little by little, the number increased during second half of the twentieth century. By the year 2000, there were 15 member countries. The new countries were Austria, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

    In 2004, the EU increased to 25 members. The Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Slovak Republic and Slovenia, plus the Mediterranean islands of Cyprus and Malta all became members. The expanded EU has a population of more than half a billion people, twice as big as the population of the US.

    Just what is a tiger mother？Amy Chua is a law professor at America's Yale University and her recent book on the subject is making waves. She's been called "dangerous", "outrageous", even a "monster" for her descriptions of how she brought up her two daughters.

    Her book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother describes fighting with a daughter for hours at the piano to ensure the child gets a piece of music right. She rejected birthday cards made for her by her girls because she didn't think they had made enough effort. She compared one child negatively with the other, threatening to burn their toys. Her rules include：schoolwork always comes first; an A ­ minus is a bad grade; children must be two years ahead of their classmates in math, and playing the violin or the piano is a must.

    Ms. Chua considers the Chinese hard work ethic(道德) as a way of creating happy, successful children—at least in her case. Although she's had a large amount of flak for her theories, one thing can't be ignored—the success of Chinese children in the education system.

    In Britain, shocking research shows that Chinese girls, for example, are outperforming all other foreign groups at GCSE—79 percent getting 5 A ­ C Grades, compared with 58 percent of white British girls. So what is it about Chinese parenting that's leading to high achievers？And how do Amy Chua's theories play into that success?

    She told me that if her daughter came back from school with 96/100 in a test, Chua would ask her what happened to the other 4 points. It's about always knowing "you can do better", she told me.

    Interestingly, in China, the birthplace of the tiger mother, people are moving away from traditional Chinese parenting. They are following more western parenting styles.

At Englands University of Plymouth, Professor Eduardo Miranda has been programming pairs of robots to compose music. Miranda's robots have simple " vocal cords" (声带)and are programmed to sing and to listen to each other. The robots' unique warbling sounds (颤音) do not perfectly match the human voice, but each machine is exactly sharing music with the other in a new and unique way.

Each robot is equipped with speakers, software that mimics the human voice, a mouth that opens as it "sings," a microphone for ears, and a camera for eyes. The robots also move. Miranda hopes that by studying his robot vocalists, he can discover something about how and why humans create, perform, and listen to music.

When the robots sing, first one robot makes six random sounds. Its partner responds with more sounds. The first robot analyzes the sounds to see if their sequences (序列)) are similar. If they are, it nods its head and commits the sounds to memory, and the second robot notices and "memorizes" the musical sequence, too. If the first robot thinks the sounds are too different, it shakes its head and both robots ignore the sounds. Then the process continues.

Miranda set up an experiment in which he left the two robots alone in his study for two weeks. When he returned, his little warblers had, by imitating each other, not only shared notes but combined them. The product of their cooperation was far from symphonic, but the robots had begun to combine the notes into their own self-developed "songs".

With the help of his warbling robots, one of Miranda's goals is to create music that no human would ever compose. Miranda believes the robots are ideal for this purpose because they would not be influenced by any existing musical styles or rules.