Do you know an outstanding junior high or high school teacher, coach, guidance counselor, librarian，or headmaster? Nominate (提名)that special teacher you'll always remember and give him/her the chance to be recognized in a famous national magazine through "Educators of the Year Contest"!

Prizes

    Cash awards will be given to those from across the country who are given the honor of Educators of the Year. Besides, your winning essays will also be published in our magazine.

Guidelines

    We will only consider essays written by teens, and nominations must be for junior high or high school educators only. Elementary school educators are not suitable.

    Convince us your educator is special. Tell us about his or her style of teaching, his or her role in school activities, and community service. What has your educator done for the entire school, your class, for you or another student? Give examples with specific details. Keep your essay between 200 and 1,000 words. Remember to include the first and last name, position, and school of your educator in your essay.

Don't forget to submit (提交)your essays through our website. You can also read our submission guidelines for more information on this website.

The Deadline

    The deadline for submitting your essays is December 30. Your essays are accepted and will appear in our magazine all over the year. Winners will be made public after the January issue is published.

    Birds' feathers are some of the most strikingly variable animal characteristics that can be observed by the eyes. The patterns that we see in birds' feathers are made up of combinations of scales, bars, and spots.

    We already know why birds have colored feathers. Generally, the color of feathers may protect a bird from being noticed by the enemy in the environment, or it can make a bird more appealing to potential mates by helping them to stand out. These aspects are well known. A greater mystery has been how the patterns are created.

    Dr. Ismael Galván and his team studied the color of feathers to see what types of colors were present in birds' complex feather patterns. The study shows they mainly consist of two types of colors: melanin（黑色素）, which produce a range of black, grey, brown, and orange color, and carotenoids（类胡萝卜色素）, which are used to create brighter colors.

    Birds cannot produce carotenoids on their own. For feathers with bright colors, birds must consume food items that contain these paints, and the carotenoids circulate through the blood and to the feather. Melanin, on the other hand, is produced by special cells in the birds' bodies.

    The team found that about 32% if the species studied have complex color patterns, with the vast majority of these complex patterns produced by melanin rather than carotenoids. If the birds were artists, they would use carotenoids as a broad brush to produce color patches, with melanin as a detail paint brush to produce more complex designs.

    But a few birds are exceptions to this rule: Three bird families do have complex patterns without melanin.

    A man, who sometimes takes my bus, is in rags. His life seems different from that of the others. He looks exhausted and carries nothing. He appears along a downtown street, seemingly out of nowhere. We sometimes want to know where he sleeps at night.

    A few weeks ago he boarded the bus. A few stops later, a young woman boarded. She swiped (刷) her bus-card, only to find the machine would not accept it. The driver told her to pay the $2.25 fare. “I just bought this card,” she said. “I paid the money...”

    The driver said she could take the card back to the sales office and explain the problem. In the meantime she would have to pay the fare for that day. The woman became confused and distressed. The rest of us just watched, wondering how the problem would be solved. Suddenly the man rose from his seat, dropped a few coins into the fare box.

    “You're lucky,” the bus driver said quietly. “He paid for you.” Silence fell over the bus. The rest of us had watched the woman's discomfort, but he felt it. We lawyers, journalists and business people headed downtown to help fix the world. He fixed her world.

    I haven't seen him since that day. Some people believe angels occasionally drop down and move among us. All I know is that I have a new respect for the simple act of kindness. It speeds us along on our way.

    A court battle between German and Israeli archives （档案馆） over Kafka's manuscripts （手稿）raised literary, not just legal, questions. At the time of his death, Kafka hardly seemed like a candidate for world fame. He had a minor reputation in German literary circles. He published a few stories in magazines, but they received little attention.

    After he died in 1924, his friend Max Brod collected, edited and published his works - despite Kafka's own instructions in his will ordering the manuscripts to be destroyed - thus making Kafka a household name after his death. When the Nazis invaded Prague, Brod escaped to Israel, bringing the manuscripts with him. When he died in 1968, his manuscripts, together with those of Kafka, were transferred to his secretary Esther Hoffe.

    Even though Brod asked in his will that the manuscripts be given to a public archive, Hoffe sold some of them abroad for a great deal of money. Many of them eventually made it to the German Literature Archive. In 2007, she died and left her properties to her daughters. Then the case about the manuscripts started after the death of one of her daughters. The court said Hoffe had no rights, and could not have any such rights for the documents Brod took from Kafka's apartment after his death.

    Ironically, Kafka's stubborn homelessness and non-belonging in his works were accurately what ensured his place at the center of 20^th-century literature. W. H. Auden proposed that Kafka was to the cold, absurd 20^th century what Dante or Shakespeare had been to their times - the writer who captured the spirit of the age. That is why, in the end, it hardly matters whether Kafka's manuscripts stay in Germany or Israel. What counts is that we are all living in Kafka's world.

    For many students who desire to move around but not far freely, one of the most common vehicles is the bicycle. For such a seemingly simple invention, its story is not that simple.

    Most historians trace its origin back to 1817, when a German nobleman named Karl von Drais invented a wooden, two­wheeled machine that riders moved forward with their feet. His invention became popular in both England and France, where it eventually became known as the velocipede. Unfortunately, it was eventually banned as a danger to pedestrians and was rarely seen after the early 1820s.

    Things were quiet for several decades until the bicycle development took off in the 1860s. An important milestone happened in Paris in 1863 when pedals were added to the front axle (轴). This occurred in Pierre Michaux's workshop, but it's unclear whether he or his employee, Pierre Lallement, should be given credit for the innovation Lallement moved to the United States, where he obtained a patent for "improvements in velocipedes" in 1866. These new machines proved to be popular, and the name "bicycle" had come into use by 1869. However, many people referred to them as "bone shakers", which described their clunky ride due to a heavy wooden frame and steel wheels.

    In the 1870s, "high wheelers" or "penny­farthings" became popular. However, with a large front wheel and a much smaller rear wheel, they could be dangerous, if riders had to stop suddenly, as they would "take a header" when their momentum (动量) carried them over the front wheel onto their heads. Eventually, English inventor John Kemp Starley designed a "safety bicycle" with two same small wheels, a chain drive, and a set of gears. With tires added in and brake systems bettered in the following decades, bicycle production had skyrocketed to over one million bicycles by 1899.

    Mass production of bicycles increased their popularity greatly, since they became affordable for the average person. Over the course of the 20th century, manufacturers continued to improve the features and design of bicycles as new technologies appeared.