Nine years ago, after Leo had died, people said to me. "I never knew he was your stepfather." You see, I never called him that. At first, he was no one special in my life. Then he became my friend. In time, I felt he was also my father.

    Leo married my mother when I was eleven. Two years later we moved into a house in a new suburban development, where we put down roots. At first our lawn was just a mud with wild grass, but Leo saw bright possibilities. "We'll plant trees there to give us shade as well as some flowers," he said. And just these little touches made our house different from all the others. More important, a real family was forming. Leo was becoming a full-time parent, and I was learning what it meant to have a father.

    Weekday mornings when the weather was bad, Leo often drove me to school. Having a father drop you off may have been something my classmates took for granted, but I always thought it was wonderful. Saturday mornings, we went to the hardware (计算机硬件) shop, then stepped into the five-and-ten, buying a sports magazine or something else. Some people might think that doing shopping together is nothing special, but I, who had ever before spent my childhood watching other families do their everyday activities, experienced them now with extreme delight. Looking back, I realized that Leo gave me what I needed most—the experience of doing ordinary things together as a family.

    Soon after we moved to the suburbs, one of our new neighbors introduced herself to me. She had already met my mother and Leo. "You know," she said, "you look just like your father." I knew she was just making a conversation--but even so... "Thank you", I said. Why tell her anything different?

    A new study has discovered that meditation（冥想）and oxygen sport together reduce depression. The Rutgers University study found that this mind and body combination, done twice a week for only two months, reduced the symptoms for a group of students by 40 percent.

    “We are excited by the findings because we saw such a meaningful improvement in both clinically depressed and non-depressed students,” said lead author Dr. Brandon Alderman. “It is the first time that both of these two behavioral ways have been looked at together for dealing with depression.”

    Researchers believe the two activities have an interactive effect in combating depression. Alderman and Dr. Tracey Shors discovered that a combination of mental and physical training (MAP) enabled students with major depressive disorder not to let problems or negative thoughts defeat them.

    Rutgers researchers say those who participated in the study began with 30 minutes of focused attention meditation followed by 30 minutes of oxygen sport. They were told that if their thoughts drifted to the past or the future they should refocus on their breathing, enabling those with depression to accept moment-to-moment changes in attention.

    Shors, who studies the production of new brain cells in the hippocampus—part of the brain involved in memory and learning—says scientists have shown in animal models that oxygen sport exercise keeps a large number of certain cells alive.

    The idea for the human intervention（干预）came from her laboratory studies, she says, with the main goal of helping individuals acquire new skills so that they can learn to recover from stressful life events.

    By learning to focus their attention and exercise, people who are fighting depression can acquire new learning skills that can help them process information and reduce the overwhelming recollection of memories from the past, Shors says.

    “We know these treatments can be practiced over a lifetime and that they will be effective in improving mental health.” said Alderman. “The good news is that this intervention can be practiced by anyone at any time and at no cost.”

    The online economy—from search to email to social media—is built in large part on the fact that consumers are willing to give away their data in exchange for products that are free and easy to use. The assumption behind this trade-off is that without giving up all that data, those products either couldn't be so good or would have to come at a cost.

    But a new working paper, released this week by Lesley Chiou of Occidental College and Catherine Tucker of MIT, suggests that the trade-off may not always be necessary. By studying the effects of privacy regulations in the EU, they attempted to measure whether the anonymization(匿名化) of search data hurts the quality of search results.

    Most search engines capture user data, including IP addresses and other data that can identify a user across multiple visits. This data allows them search companies to improve their algorithms(算法) and to personalize results for the user. At least, that's the idea. To determine whether storage of users' personal data improves search results, Chiou and Tucker looked at how search results from Bring and Yahoo differed before and after changes in the European Commission's rules on data retention(数据保存). In 2008 the Commission recommended that search engines reduce the period over which search engines kept user records. In response, Yahoo decided to strengthen its privacy policy by anonymizing user data after 90 days. In 2010 Microsoft changed its policy, and began deleting IP addresses associated with searches on Bring after six months and all data points intended to identify a user across visits after 18 months. In 2011 Yahoo changed its policy again, this time deciding to store personal data longer—for 18 months rather than 90 days—allowing the researchers yet another chance to measure how changes in data storage affected search results.

    The researchers then looked at data from UK residents' web history before and after the changes. To measure search quality, they looked at the number of repeated searches, a signal of dissatisfaction with search results. In all three cases, they found no statistically significant effect on search result quality following changes in data retention policy. In other words, the decision to anonymize the data didn't appear to impair the search experience. “Our results suggest that the costs of privacy may be lower than currently perceived,” the authors write, though they note that previous studies have come to different conclusions.

    There is a breakthrough in building aircrafts. Bendable wings covered with overlapping(部分重叠) pieces resembling fish sizes could be used to build swifter, fuel-efficient aircraft, a new study finds.

    Nowadays, conventional aircrafts typically rely on ailerons (副翼) to help control the way the planes tip as they fly. However, when the Wright brothers flew the first airplane, Flyer 1, over a century ago, they used no ailerons but wires and pulleys that twisted the wood-and-canvas wings, to control the plane.

    Scientists have long sought to develop aircrafts that can alter their wings during flight, just as birds can. However, most previous attempts have failed because they relied on heavy mechanical control structures within the wings. These structures were also complex and unreliable, said Neil Gershenfeld, a physicist and director of the Center for Bits and Atoms at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

    The new wing consists of a system of tiny, strong, lightweight modules. The shape of the wing can be changed uniformly along its length using two small motors, which apply a twisting pressure to each wingtip. These wings are covered in “skins” of overlapping strips of flexible material resembling fish sizes. These strips move across each other as the wings alter, providing a smooth outer surface, the researchers explained.

    Wind-tunnel tests of these wings showed that they at least matched the aerodynamic properties of conventional wings, at about one-tenth the weight. Initial tests using remotely piloted aircrafts made with these wings have shown great promise, said Benjamin Jenett, a graduate student at the Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT.

    The new modular structures the scientists developed could be manufactured quickly in mass quantities and then installed by teams of small robots. These modular structures also can be disassembled more easily, making repairs simpler.

    “Still, the first aircraft built using this strategy will not be a passenger jet, ”Gershenfeld said. “Instead, the technology will likely first be tested on unmanned aircraft, leading to drones (无人机) that can fly for a long time, to help deliver internet access or medicine to remote villages and do some rescue works.”

    Linda Eveans was my best friend—like the sister I never had. We did everything together: piano lesson, movies, swimming, and horseback riding.

    When I was 13, my family moved away, Linda and I kept in touch through letters， and we saw each other on special times, like my wedding and Linda's. Soon we were busy with children and moving to new homes, and we wrote less often. One day a card that I sent came back, stamped "Address Unknown". I had no idea about how to find Linda.

    Over the years, I missed Linda very much, I wanted to share happiness of my children and then grandchildren, And I needed to share my sadness when my brother and then mother died, There was an empty place in my heart that only a friend like Linda could fill.

    One day, I was reading a newspaper when I noticed a photo of a young woman who looked very much like Linda and whose last name was Wagman—Linda's married name. "There must be thousands of Wagmans." I thought, but I still wrote to her.

    She called as soon as she got my letter, "Mrs, Tobin!" she said excitedly, "Linda Evans Wagman is my mother." Minutes later I heard a voice that I recognized at once, even after 40 years. We laughed and cried and caught up on each other's lives. Now the empty place in my heart is filled. And there's one thing that Linda and I know for sure: we won't lose each other again!

Racing is nothing new for Sebastian Rosado. He was born with cerebral palsy (脑瘫), which affects a person's ability to move. Though most of his life has been limited to a wheel-chair, he has done at least one race a year since 2011.

It was about a decade ago that his mother, Jaime, was training for a race in Puerto Rico, and Sebastian asked if he could accompany her. She'd have to push him in the wheelchair because his arm functions are limited, and she was okay with that. However, the race wouldn't allow it. Then, Sebastian's family decided to make a special race for children like Sebastian. The race gives them a chance to prove that despite being told from a young age that they might not be able to do some things in their lives, they can also become what they wish to be in life.

Sebastian has run it every year using a special walker. Each year, he tries to outdo his previous goal. Instead of just 5 km in 2020, he wanted to attempt to run 21 km over 30 days. Sebastian's plan is to complete the distance by May 9, accounting for completing 1 km, at most, in a day.

Sebastian used to train in a track and field facility close to home, and it's amazing to hear runners telling him things like, "Wow , sometimes I don't have the strength to train but when I see you doing this, I feel that I have no excuse," 62 swimmers are joining Sebastian's challenge this month by swimming 800 meters each one.

Sebastian has a saying that your disability is not in your body, but in your mind. It's really powerful. If you promise yourself you'll do something, you can achieve it by using your mind.