I live in the land of Disney, Hollywood. You may think people in such an attractive and exciting, fun-filled place are happier than others. If so, you have some mistaken ideas about the nature of happiness.

    Many intelligent people still consider happiness equal to fun. The truth is that fun and happiness have little or nothing in common. Fun is what we experience during an act. Happiness is what we experience after an act. It is a deeper, more lasting emotion.

    Going to an amusement park or ball game, watching a movie or television, are fun activities that help us relax, temporarily forget our problems and maybe even laugh. But they do not bring happiness, because their positive effects end when the fun ends.

    I have often thought that if Hollywood stars have a role to play, it is to teach us that happiness has nothing to do with fun. These rich, beautiful people have constant access to glamorous parties, fancy cars, expensive homes, everything that brings “happiness”. But in memoir after memoir, famous people expose the unhappiness hidden beneath all their fun — depression, alcoholism, drug addiction, broken marriages, troubled children and extreme loneliness.

    Ask an unmarried man why he refuses to get married even though he finds dating to be less and less satisfying. If he's honest, he will tell you that he is afraid of making a commitment. For commitment is in fact quite painful. The single life is filled with fun, adventure and excitement. Marriage has such moments, but they are not its most distinguishing features.

    Similarly, couples that choose not to have children are deciding in favor of painless fun over painful happiness. They can dine out whenever they want and sleep as late as they want. Couples with babies are lucky to get a whole night's sleep or a three-day vacation. I don't know any parent who would choose the word fun to describe raising children.

    The way people stick to the belief that a fun-filled, pain-free life equals happiness actually reduces their chances of ever achieving real happiness. If fun and pleasure are equal to happiness, then pain must be equal to unhappiness. As a result, they fear the pain unavoidably brought by such things as marriage, raising children, professional achievement, religious commitment and self-improvement.

    But, in fact, the opposite is true. More times than not, things that lead to happiness involve some pain. The very efforts are the source of true happiness. Understanding and accepting that true happiness has nothing to do with fun is one of the most liberating realizations we can ever come to.

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    When my brother and I were young, my mom would take us on Transportation Days.

    It goes like this: You can't take any means of transportation more than once. We would start from home, walking two blocks to the rail station. We'd take the train into the city center, then a bus, switching to the tram, then maybe a taxi. We always considered taking a horse carriage in the historic district, but we didn't like the way the horses were treated, so we never did. At the end of the day, we took the subway to our closest station, where Mom's friend was waiting to give us a ride home — our first car ride of the day.

    The good thing about Transportation Days is not only that Mom taught us how to get around. She was born to be multimodal(多方式的). She understood that depending on cars only was a failure of imagination and, above all, a failure of confidence — the product of a childhood not spent exploring subway tunnels.

    Once you learn the route map and step with certainty over the gap between the train and the platform, nothing is frightening anymore. New cities are just light-rail lines to be explored. And your personal car, if you have one, becomes just one more tool in the toolbox — and often an inadequate one, limiting both your mobility and your wallet.

    On Transportation Days, we might stop for lunch on Chestnut Street or buy a new book or toy, but the transportation was the point. First, it was exciting enough to watch the world speed by from the train window. As I got older, my mom helped me unlock the mysteries that would otherwise have paralyzed my first attempts to do it myself: How do I know where to get off? How do I know how much it costs? How do I know when I need tickets, and where to get them? What track, what line, which direction, where's the stop, and will I get wet when we go under the river?

    I'm writing this right now on an airplane, a means we didn't try on our Transportation Days and, we now know, the dirtiest and most polluting of them all. My flight routed me through Philadelphia. My multimodal mom met me for dinner in the airport. She took a train to meet me.

    “Plants were expected to get larger with increased carbon dioxide in atmosphere, but changes in temperature, humidity and nutrient availability seem to trumped the benefits of increased carbon dioxide,” said researchers from the National University of Singapore.

    45 percent of the species studied now reach smaller adult sizes than they did in the past. The researchers pointed out that warmer temperatures and changing habitats, caused by climate change, are possible reasons for shrinking creatures.

    “We do not yet know the mechanisms involved, or why some organism are getting smaller while others are unaffected,” the researchers said. “Until we understand more, we could be risking negative consequences that we can' t yet quantify.”

    The change was big in cold-blooded animals. Only two decades of warmer temperatures were enough to make reptiles smaller. An increase of 1 degree centigrade caused nearly a 10 percent increase in metabolism(新陈代谢). Greater use of energy resulted in tiny tortoises and little lizards. Fish are smaller now too. Though overfishing has played a part in reducing numbers, experiments show that warmer temperatures also stop fish growth. There is a recent report on warmer temperatures' negative effects on plankton, the base of the marine ecosystem.

    Warm-blooded animals weren't immune from the size change caused by climate change. Many birds are now smaller. Mammals have been miniaturized too. Soay sheep are thinner. Red deer are weaker. And polar bears are smaller, compared with historical records.

    This is not the first time this has happened in Earth' s history. 55 million years ago, a warming event similar to the current climate change caused bees, spiders and ants to shrink by 50 to 75 percent over several thousand years. That event happened over a long time than the current climate change.

    The speed of modem climate change could mean organisms may not respond or adapt quickly enough, especially those with long generation times. So, it is likely that more negative influences of climate change will be shown in future.

    A great white shark in a California aquarium attacked two soupfin sharks(翅鲨), causing their deaths. The attack was not a natural action for food, but a kind of response when the two sharks swam too close to the great white. The great white didn't attacked other fellows, but the officials had to move other soupfin sharks to another tank(贮水池)for their safety.

    These attacks had given rise to calls for the freedom of the 88-pound, 5-foot-3- inch shark. The aquarium housed the shark in a huge tank. However, according to experts, the tank was not big enough for the shark. Its nose was bloody from striking the glass of the aquarium. Great white sharks in the wild had a big amount of migration, sometimes traveling 50 miles a day. Because the shark was still young, there was possibility of his growing. As it grows, it can became more troubled in the limited space.

    Aquarium officials said that keeping the shark in the aquarium allowed them to study their behavior that they cannot study with free great white sharks. When they studied behavioral patterns, scientists believed that they can help great white sharks in the wild.

    Since the shark had been on display, the number of people who visited aquarium increased greatly. The one-year-old shark was the longest surviving great white living here. It had been at the Monterey Bay Aquarium for six months. Other great whites did not survive for longer than 16 days in the aquarium.

    “Long time no see” is a very interesting sentence. When I first read this sentence from an American friend's email, I laughed. I thought it was a perfect example of Chinglish.

    Obviously, it is a word-by-word literal translation of the Chinese greetings with a ruled English grammar and structure! Later on, my friend told me that it is a standard American greeting. I was too surprised to believe her. Her words could not convince me at all. So I did a research on google.com. To my surprise, there are over 60 thousand web pages containing “Long time no see.” This sentence has been widely used in emails, letters, newspapers, movies, books, or any other possible places. Though it is sort of informal, it is part of the language that Americans use daily. Ironically, if you type this phrase in Microsoft Word, the software will tell you that the grammar needs to be corrected.

    Nobody knows the origin of this Chinglish sentence. Some people believe that it came from Charlie Chan's movies. In the 1930s, Hollywood moviemakers successfully created a world wide famous Chinese detective named “Charlie Chan” on wide screens. Detective Chan likes to teach Americans some Chinese wisdom by quoting Confucius. “Long time no see” was his trademark. Soon after Charlie Chan, “Long time no see” became a popular phrase in the real world with thanks to the popularity of these movies.

    Some scholars refer to America as a huge pot of stew. All kinds of culture are mixed in the stew together, and they change the color and taste of each other. American Chinese, though a minority ethnic(少数民族的成员) group in the United States, is also contributing some changes to the stew! Language is usually the first thing to be influenced in the mixed stew.

    You can have some other examples than adoptions（采用）from Chinese, such as pizza from Italian, susi from Japanese, and déjà vu from French etc. There is a long list! Americans do not just simply borrow something from others. They will modify it and make it their own, so you would not be surprised to find a tofu and peanut butter hamburger in a restaurant, or to buy a bottle of iced Chinese green tea with honey in a grocery store. Since Americans appreciate Chinese culture more and more nowadays, I believe more Chinese words will become American English in the future. In this way the American stew keeps adding richness and flavor.

    The Earth is facing a climate crisis, but it's also getting greener and leafier. According to new research, the rise is largely due to China and India.

    A study by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), based on extensive satellite photographs and published in the journal Nature Sustainability, has revealed that the two countries with the world's biggest populations are also responsible for the largest increase in greenness.

    Since 2000, the planet's green leaf area has increased by 5 percent, or over 2 million square miles. That's an area equivalent to the sum total of the Amazon rainforests, NASA says. But researchers stressed that the new greenery does not neutralize deforestation and its negative impacts on ecosystems elsewhere.

    A third of the leaf increase is thanks to China and India, due to the implementation of major tree-planting projects alongside a vast increase in agriculture.

    Using the data from a NASA sensor, researchers discovered that China is the source of a quarter of the increase in green leaf area, despite possessing only 6.6 percent of the world's vegetated area (植被区). Forests account for 42 percent of that increase, while croplands make up a further 32 percent. China's increase in forest area is the result of forest preservation and expansion programs, NASA said, established to fight against the impacts of climate change, air pollution and soil erosion (水土流失). India has contributed a further 6.8 percent rise in green leaf area, with 82 percent from croplands and 4.4 percent from forests.

    Rama Nemani, a co-author of the study and a researcher at NASA's Ames Research Center, said in a statement, "When the greening of the Earth was first observed, we thought it was due to a warmer, wetter climate and fertilization from the added carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, leading to more leaf growth in northern forests, for instance." "Now, with the data that lets us understand the phenomenon at really small scales, we see that humans are also contributing," Nemani said. "This will help scientists make better predictions about the behavior of different Earth systems, which will help countries make better decisions about how and when to take action."

    Thomas Pugh, a professor at the University of Birmingham's School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, said the NASA report expands scientists' understanding of the causes behind global greening. But he also cautioned that a direct line cannot be drawn between an increase in global greening and a decrease in negative impacts of climate change.