At 80 years old，scientist Jane Goodall continues to enjoy the joy of discovery.“Trees can communicate with each other，” she said during her Nov.16，2014 China visit to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the China establishment of her youth organization Roots & Shoots，which has grown to more than 600 branches in the country among 150，000 active groups globally.

    Jane Goodall still travels 300 days a year in all around the world and says she absorbs energy from the inspired people she meets in each country.The elderly activist and the youth take inspiration from each other.

    On Nov.16，2014，she visited the project of Roots & Shoots which was set up in Beijing.“She thought our project was great，” says 16－year－old Beijing Experimental High School student Qi Zhengyang，whose group helps protect a wetlands in the suburbs of Beijing.“She said we're doing a good job.She paid attention to us.”

    Jane Goodall plans to continue to set up Roots & Shoots branches as many as possible throughout the world.“I'll go on as long as I can，” she says.“I hope I maintain physical health as long as possible because there's so much to do.” Her aspiration for the organization in China is to expand in rural areas.Most branches are in big cities as Beijing and Shanghai.

    It was publishing her findings about chimpanzees (My Friends the Wild Chimpanzees)  more than half a century ago that made Jane Goodall a household name in the world.She was named United Nations Messenger of Peace in 2002.

    Some of the members in Roots & Shoots realize Goodall is 80 and has already considered who'll lead the movement once she's gone.“It can be all of us，” she says.“A group is stronger than one person.We can do more working together.”

    When Steve Jobs was born on February 24, 1955, in San Francisco, California, his unmarried mother decided to put him for adoption because she wanted a girl. So in the middle of the night, his mother called a lawyer named Paul Jobs and said, “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” But his mother told his future parents to promise that they would send Jobs to college. After Steve Jobs graduated from high school, he went to college but decided to drop out because it was so expensive that he had to sleep on the floor in his friends' rooms.

At 20, he and a friend started a company in a garage on April 1, 1976. Jobs named their company —-Apple in memory of a happy summer he had spent as an orchard (果园) in Oregon.

    After 10 years of hard time and failures, starting from two kids working in a garage, Apple computer eventually grew into a big company with over 4,000 employees.

    At 30, Jobs , however, was fired from the company he co-founded. But after he had to leave the company, Apple was under heavy pressure from rival (对手) Microsoft and in 1996 posted billions of dollars in losses. Apple needed Steve Jobs and he was appointed as Apple' CEO in1997. Under his leadership, Apple returned to profitability and introduced new products such as the iPhone and the iPad.

    Steve Jobs once said, “Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick, Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking.

    Last year, Claire Noble-Randall woke up at 5:30 am every morning. She had to catch two buses to arrive in time for first-period chemistry at Ingraham High School in Seattle, US.

    Ingraham starts at 8 am, but Noble-Randall often didn't go to sleep until after midnight. “It was really hard not to fall asleep in class,” she said.

Her mom solved the problem this year when she discovered that other parents had hired a private city tour bus to take their children to the school.

    “Now, she leaves the house at a much more reasonable time 7:10 in the morning…to catch the little tour bug at 7:23 am,” said her mother, Noelle Noble.

    That may be one way to help students get more sleep. But more than 3,300 people have signed an online petition (请愿) looking for a better solution from the Seattle school district. Those who have signed the petition want all high schools and middle schools to start no earlier than 8:30 am. Most of Seattle's high schools and middle schools start at 8 am or earlier.

    Later start times for teenagers is an idea that some parents around the nation, have wanted for years. They've provided plenty of scientific evidence that teenagers tend to be night owls and delayed start times improve their health, mood, attention, and, in some cases, learning.

    But attempts to delay start times for teenagers haven't worked. Coaches don't want late dismissals (放学) cutting into sports practices; community groups don't want to wait longer for gyms and fields and before- and after-school programs don't want to change their schedules.

    This time, however, they've got Seattle School Board. President Sharon Peaslee on their side. She herself is the mother of two high school students. Peaslee hopes other board members will pass her plan calling on the district to find a way to make the changes.

    Every year, billions of kilograms of fresh produce are wasted in the United States. Meanwhile, millions of poor Americans go hungry, without access to healthy and affordable meals. Evan Lutz, CEO and founder of Hungry Harvest, was inspired to act after seeing extreme poverty in areas of Baltimore, Maryland. He wants to reduce the so—called food waste in that area. His work is to make sure no food goes to waste and no person is ever hungry in America. And he combines that goal with a love for business.

    Hungry Harvest is a business which collects and sells fruits and vegetables that most food companies will throw away. Everything doesn't grow the same way on a farm. But all that is too big or too small gets thrown out. That is why everything in a grocery store looks similar. Hungry Harvest will box those imperfect ones and deliver them to customers once a week.

    For every purchase, Hungry Harvest delivers healthy food to people in need. Hungry Harvest has recovered 300,000 pounds of produce to date and provided 100,000 pounds to those in need.

    Lutz established Hungry Harvest in 2014.Its success depends on team work. Every week on Monday or Tuesday they will decide what will go into the next week's box by calling up packing houses and wholesalers to see what they will normally throw away that week. They then place the order. The last step ls to send goods to customers.

    In January 2016,Lutz appeared on the American business competition television show "Shark Tank" and got even more than he expected: $100,000.Lutz is using the money to expand. Actually, more than six billion pounds is wasted each year due to "ugly" surface. Hungry Harvest is on the way to saving more food from going to waste and feeding hungry families.

Love for language

    Very few of us become fluent in another language by studying it in high school. I went to university and then moved across the country, pursued a demanding career, married and raised children.

    I made an effort to maintain the little bit of French that I learned in school, but eventually realized that this was pointless. I was well aware that new languages are best learned when young, and that our abilities in that regard decline with age. However, just before my 50th birthday, I signed up for French classes. After I was tested to see which group I belonged in, I was placed at almost the introductory level. When I looked around at my first Saturday morning class, I was struck by how many of the students were learning French as a third, fourth, or even fifth language.

    Contrary to my assumption that learning a new language was impossibly difficult, there were people who learned new languages as a matter of course. I found that it really was true that certain linguistic (语言的) abilities fade with age.

    While I'd always thought of myself as a quick learner, that was no longer the case. I absorbed new vocabulary very slowly. What I learned one week seemed to slip away as soon as I learned the next skill. I looked up the same words and language structures over and over again.

    Now, a couple of years in, I can listen to the news in French and catch 90 percent of it on the first try, read a novel if the language is not too difficult, and hold up my end of a conversation if it doesn't go too fast.

    Who knows what I might still accomplish?

    I've learned so much beyond grammar and vocabulary. I've met people from around the world and all walks of life who have the courage to make fools of themselves in order to learn something new.

    I've been taught by patient and inspirational teachers from many corners of the world, including France, Eastern Europe, the Caribbean and Africa.

    Listening to the news as it is presented to the people of France, I have a renewed understanding of how something can look completely different from another perspective. I've learned that a language is not just a set of words, but a way of thinking. But most of all, I've learned that it really is never too late to learn something new.

    Ride-hailing apps and robot cars promise to change how we get around and the effects are already being felt. Traffic in New York is slowing down. Jams are common in Manhattan, especially in its business districts. Daytime traffic in the busiest areas now moves almost 20% more slowly than it did five years ago.

    It seems a place ripe for wide use of ride-hailing apps that, you might think, would reduce some of the jams. However, those apps appear to be making things worse as traffic has slowed in line with the growing popularity of apps such as Uber and Lyft, a study by transport expert Bruce Schaller suggests.

    Over the four years of the study, the number of cars in Manhattan seeking ride-hailing fares increased by 81%. There are now about 68, 000 ride-sharing drivers across New York. That's about five times the number of the yellow cabs licensed to operate there, he found. There are so many drivers, his work suggests, who spend about 45% of their spare time just touring for fares. That is a lot of unused cars blocking a lot of busy streets.

    Simple physics explains why ride-sharing vehicles are causing, not curing jams, said Jarrett Walker, a public transport policy expert who has advised hundreds of cities about moving people.

    "Lots of people are deciding that, 'Oh, public transport is just too much trouble this morning,' or whenever, which causes a shift from it," he told the BBC. "That means moving people from larger vehicles into smaller ones, which means more vehicles to move the same people. Therefore, more traffic."

    Data gathered about ride-sharing drivers illustrates how they contribute to congestion (塞车), said Prof. Christo Wilson, a computer scientist at Northeastern University who has studied the services. "You can look at the traffic pattern for the Uber vehicles and it perfectly matches the peaks for the rush hour and the peak time of a day," he said. They are out there in force at the worst possible times.