Many students are involved in social practice besides study. On Monday, April 17, 2017, a unique partnership between Saint Agatha and Phalanx Family Services began. Saint Agatha is a primary school and day care program. Phalanx Family Services is a full-service, nonprofit （非盈利的）organization offering various programming for in-need families living in Chicago.

    Thirteen in-school youths, between the ages of 16~18, started training as young reporters in an eight-week camp organized by the two organizations. The program is designed to teach them how to become city reporters. After completing the program successfully, they will receive a job reporting for one of nine online news about the project.

    The very thought of 13 youths' improving reading and writing levels and hunting for career opportunities in journalism（新闻业）is exciting! Imagine, Chicago youths report positive and inspiring stories about the happenings around Chicago's black and brown communities, which are much better than frightening stories coming from local and national medium.

    I admire Saint Agatha and Phalanx Family Services for training youths in a needed skill set. As I see it, technology has harmed youths' reading and writing abilities. My father often says, “Youth is wasted on the young.” It sounds like the wisdom of the old. But Saint Agatha offers training and the opportunity for youths to take an active part in reporting the happenings and events they experience day to day in order to prove students don't waste youth.

    The possibility of self-driving robot cars has often seemed like a futurist's dream, years away from coming into reality in the real world. Well, the future is apparently now. The California Department of Motor Vehicles began giving permits in April for companies to test truly self-driving cars on public roads. The state also cleared the way for companies to sell or rent out self-driving cars, and for companies to operate driverless taxi services. California, it should be noted, isn't leading the way here. Companies have been testing their cars in cities across the country. It's hard to predict when driverless cars will be everywhere on our roads. But however long it takes, the technology may change our transportation systems and our cities, for better or for worse, depending on how the transformation is managed.

    While much of the debate so far has been focused on the safety of driverless cars, policymakers should be talking more about how self-driving cars can help reduce traffic jams, cut emissions(排放)and offer more convenient and affordable choices to move around. The arrival of driverless cars is a chance to make sure that those cars are environmentally friendly and more shared.

    Do we want to copy or even worsen the traffic of today with driverless cars? Imagine a future where most adults own their self-driving cars. They accept long, slow journeys to and from work on crowded highways because they can work, entertain themselves or sleep on the ride. They take their driverless car to a date and set the empty car to circle the building to avoid paying for parking. Instead of walking a few blocks to pick up a child or the dry cleaning, they send the self-driving minibus. The convenience even leads fewer people to take public transport — an unwelcome side effect researchers have already found in ride-hailing(网约车)services. Policymakers should start thinking now about how to make sure the appearance of driverless cars doesn't worsen the transportation system we have today. The coming technological development presents a chance for cities and states to develop transportation systems designed to move more people, and more affordably. The car of the future is coming. We just have to plan for it.

    I was 16 when my father finally decided he would send me to wilderness camp for several months. He had threatened to do it many times before, but my mother had always managed to prevent him from doing so. This ti me he insisted on doing it.

    The latest incident was the last straw. Impulsively (冲动地), I had pushed Mr. Ford, my math teacher, down a flight of steps at school. He broke his arm in two places. Anyway, he had agreed not to accuse me as a favor to my dad, who was in the middle of a tight race for sheriff (执法官) in our town. But my reckless behavior had my dad's closest advisor talking.

    "John, he's your son and he's a kid, but he is dragging you down," I heard Jake Hutch tell my dad through his closed office door the night after I pushed Mr. Ford. "If you can't make your son obey the rules, how can you make the law obeyed in this town?"

    So, off to Pisgah National Forest I went. I imagined hours of untold abuse at the hands of some strong sergeants (军士). I was determined not to be broken. I was who I was,

    Nearly every day for six months, a small group of other troubled teens and I carried our 30-pound backpacks on a difficult journey covering about 10 miles. We hiked in a rough wilderness that seemed untouched by civilization.

    Our sergeants were firm but kind, not frightening as I had imagined. We learned how to make a fire without matches and create a shelter with branches and grass. We learned which plants were safe to eat out in the wild. I felt myself change. I was calm and often reflective. My old, impulsive self was gone.

    One morning, six months later, my dad came to pick me up. I ran to hug him and saw happiness and love in his eyes.

    "So what's it like being sheriff?" I asked on the ride home.

    "I lost the race, Danny," he said.

    "I'm sorry, Dad." I knew my behavior probably had a lot to do with the defeat.

    Dad squeezed my shoulder and brought me close. "As long as I don't ever lose you, I'm okay."

    We spend a great amount of time listening to music. Most college students listen to music at least three or four times a week, and more than 50 percent of them go to at least one concert per year.

    According to new research, we may be born liking music, because human beings are born to find certain combinations of sounds attractive. For example, young children can recognize a familiar Song even when its key is changed. Similarly, they respond with more emotions to their mothers' singing than to their mothers' speech. Careful analysis of mothers' child-directed songs indicates that each mother's songs remain stable from one "performance" to the next, and this may encourage children's engagement with the songs.

    Research with adults suggests that music catches our attention by activating(激活) brain pathways that are most suited to processing music than to processing other kinds of sound. Specifically, music appreciation relies on the auditory cortex(听觉皮层) on the right side of the brain, which is specialized to process sound that characterizes music-in contrast to the left auditory cortex, which processes the stop-and-start bursts of sound that characterize speech.

    Although some Psychologists remain skeptical about whether music may have powerful effects on our thinking, a number of studies have shown that listening to music can increase people's spatial reasoning abilities Furthermore, It is clear that music can greatly influence our emotions. Personally significant music activates areas of the brain associated with pleasure and reward, the same areas that are activated by sex and good food.

    Researchers do not agree about how humans' abilities to process and enjoy music have come into being. Anyway, the next time you enjoy listening to a piece of music, remember that the most complex pieces of audio equipment are the ones between your headphones.

Babies are surrounded by human language, always listening and processing. Eventually, they put sounds together to produce a "Daddy" or a "Mama". But what still confuses neuroscientists is exactly how the brain works to put it all together.

To figure it out, a team of researchers turned to a frequent stand-in (代替) for babies when it comes to language learning: the song-learning zebra finch. "We've known songbirds learn their song by first forming a memory of their father's song or another adult's song. Then they use that memory to guide their song learning," said Neuroscientist Todd Roberts. "It's been a long-term goal of the field to figure out how or where in the brain this memory is. This type of imitative learning that birds do is very similar to the type of learning that we engage in regularly—particularly when we're young, we use it to guide our speech learning."

Roberts and his team had a feeling that the interface (交叉区域) between sensory areas and motor areas in the brain was critical for this process, and they focused on a group of brain cells called the NIf.

"In order to prove that we could identify these circuits, we thought if we could implant a false memory." First, they used a virus to cause the neurons (神经元) in the birds' NIf to become sensitive to light. Then, using a tiny electrode as a flashlight, they activated (激活) the neurons. The length of each pulse of light corresponded with the amount of time the neurons would fire. And the birds' brains interpreted that time period as the length of each note.

Soon enough, the birds began to practice the notes they had learned, even though they never really heard the sounds. Amazingly, the birds produced them in the correct social situations. The researchers say this is the first time anybody has found exactly a part of the brain necessary for generating the sorts of memories needed to copy sounds.

"This line of research is going to help us identify where in the brain we encode memories of relevant social experiences that we use to guide learning. We know that there are several neurodevelopmental disorders in people that have really far-reaching effects on this type of learning."

Chinese President Xi Jinping once said. "Heroes come from the people." Every year, there are ordinary people spreading positive energy (正能量) and touching our hearts. Let's take a look at some of them.