I am a volunteer. I set out to help clean up the beach after a violent storm a year ago. The sight I saw was heartbreaking. The broken houses seemed to be crying. I couldn't describe how I felt. But something special among the debris (废墟) turned my day around.

    I joined a club to clean up the beach after the storm last November. As I removed the debris from the beach, I noticed an object with shiny buttons in the wet sand. It was a jacket，and I was excited since Halloween(万圣节) was coming and I thought I had found a great costume(戏服). After picking it up, I was able to see that the jacket was from West Point (西点军校), the United States Military Academy, and it had the name “deGavre” written inside. I realized the jacket might be important to someone. I decided to find the jacket's owner and return it.

    I called the West Point Museum, considering that if the family couldn't be found, the jacket should go there. The museum connected me with Kim McDermott, Director of Communications for the Academy's Association of Graduates. Kim soon ensured that the jacket had belonged to Chester Braddock deGavre, who was a 1933 graduate and a war hero, but passed away in 1993.

    I sent Kim a photo of the jacket and she posted it to the West Point Association of Graduates Facebook Page, asking if anyone could help us find the family. In less than two hours, someone had found and called the hero's wife, Teresa. Soon I started to receive personal messages from members of the deGavre family, their friends and others who were touched by the story and they found me on Facebook.

    Finding Chester deGavre's jacket and connecting to his family with the help of Facebook have been so meaningful to me. I've formed a bond(纽带) with amazing people I might have never met.

    Sonya and her family have been homeless since she was 3 years old. Over the years, they have moved more than 15times to different shelters around New York City. Moving around was hard on Sonya。At school, Sonya hid her homeless from teachers and other students. She didn't want to be treated differently from other kids.

    In sixth grade, Sonya discovered a way to deal with some of her stress. She began studying dance at her middle school. “IT was a way for me to express myself, instead of just holding everything in,”she explains. Soon, Sonya auditioned（试演）for a summer dance camp run by Alvin Alley, a famous dance company. She was accepted. “I was excited,”says Sonya.

    Dancing became an even more important part of Sonya's life in high school. But things were not going well for Sonya at school. Each time her family moved to a new shelter, Sonya often took care of her younger sisters and brothers. She helped them get ready in the morning and took them to school. They would be on time, but Sonya would be late.

    Worrying about her family kept Sonya from thinking about her own future. That changed the summer after 11^th grade. Sonya learned she would have to go to summer school to graduate. She became determined to succeed, no matter what. “It was a wake-up call,”she says.“I had to focus on school and on myself.”

    Sonya made up the work that she had missed, and finally graduated from high school. No one in her family had gone to college before. But in September 2015, Sonya enrolled in the State University of New York at Potsdam. She plans to become a doctor for kids and to teach dance to children who have disabilities.

B

    Researchers say they have created a new super-tough material in the laboratory. It is stronger, lighter and costs less than steel. But the new material is not a product of high technology. It is wood. Researcher Liangbing Hu says that it can compete with some of the world's strongest materials or even replace steel.

    The product is called Super Wood. It doesn't require any special raw, unprocessed material. That means the cost of the product will be relatively low.Hu said, “We can start with very cheap wood, and also very fancy, expensive wood. But in the end, we get very similar performance.”

    Super Wood is made by partially removing a natural polymer called lignin（木质素）. Hu explained, “Lignin is like glue to hold all the parts together in natural wood. To be able to densify（增密）the wood completely, some of the lignin has to be removed. “Strong chemicals are put on the wood to remove about half of its lignin. Then, after being left in extreme heat and pressurized for a day, the treated wood is ready.

    The wood is strong enough to build automobiles, airplanes, wind turbines and more. Researchers are finding many new ways to use wood, including creating batteries and see-through wood and paper.Hu said, “Wood has been existing on Earth for more than a million years. And human beings have been using wood for furniture, construction for more than 10 thousand years. And the more we worked on this material, we realized, we have never fully exhausted the potential of this amazing material.”

    Basketball Statistician Help Wanted

    The Athletic Department is looking for students to help assist staff during the Fall 2016, Winter 2016-17 and Spring 2017 semesters. Students in this position will be keeping live statistics during basketball games. Students must meet all of the following requirements:

    Good computer skills

    Available evenings and weekends

    Knowing basketball rules and statistics

    Students interested in working for the Athletic Department should contact the Athletic Coordinator at their respective campuses.

    TP/SS Athletic Coordinator, Michael Simone, 240-567-1308

    Rockville Athletic Coordinator, Jorge Zuniga, 240-567-7589

    Springfield Athletic Coordinator, Gary Miller, 240-567-2273

    Germantown Athletic Coordinator, Gauri Chavan, 240-567-6915

    Is any economist so dull as to criticize Christmas? At first glance, the holiday season in western economies seems a treat for those concerned with such vagaries(奇思遐想)as GDP growth. After all, everyone is spending; in America, retailers make 25% of their yearly sales and 60% of their profits between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Even so, economists find something to worry about in the nature of the purchases being made.

    Much of the holiday spending is on gifts for others. At the simplest level, giving gifts involves the giver thinking of something that the recipient would like--he tries to guess her preferences, as economists say--and then buying the gift and delivering it. Yet this guessing of preferences is not easy; indeed, it is often done badly. Every year, ties go unworn and books unread. And even if a gift is enjoyed, it may not be what the recipient would have bought if they had spent the money themselves.

    Interested in this mismatch between wants and gifts, in 1993 Joel Waldfogel, then an economist at Yale University, sought to estimate the difference in dollar terms. In a study, he asked students two questions at the end of a holiday season: first, estimate the total amount paid(by the givers) for all the holiday gifts you received; second, apart from the sentimental value of the items, if you did not have them, how much would you be willing to pay to get them? His results were gloomy: on average, a gift was valued by the recipient well below the price paid by the giver.

    In addition, recipients may not know their own preferences very well. Some of the best gifts, after all, are unexpected items that you would never have thought of buying, but which turn out to be especially well picked. And preferences can change. So by giving a jazz CD, for example, the giver may be encouraging the recipient to enjoy something that was ignored before. This, a desire to build skills, is possibly the hope held by many parents who ignore their children's desires for video games and buy them books instead.

    Finally, there are items that a recipient would like to receive but not purchase. If someone else buys them, however, they can be enjoyed guilt-free. This might explain the volume of chocolate that changes over the holidays. Thus, the lesson for gift-givers is that you should try hard to guess the preference of each person on your list and then choose a gift that will have high sentimental value.

    If you also have a friend like Francia Raisa, you are really lucky. On Thursday, singer and actress Selena Gomez, 25, used Instagram(照片墙,一款社交软件) to explain why she was "laying low" this summer. She posted a photo of herself in a hospital bed with her friend Francia Raisa holding hands. She said she recently received a kidney transplant(肾脏移植) from her best friend because of complications(并发症) from lupus(狼疮), an autoimmune disease, which means it is the result of the immune system attacking normal tissue, including the kidneys, brain, heart and lungs.

    People with lupus may first experience tiredness, joint pain or a little bit of rash(皮疹) on their bodies and can go for a long time before their doctors realize it is more serious. Many people see two or four doctors before the real problem is picked up. According to Dr. Kyriakos Kirou, roughly a third to one­half of people with lupus develop kidney disease, and up to one in five of them will eventually need a transplant, sometimes because they weren't treated with effective drugs to prevent the immune system from attacking the kidneys. Though Gomez said that she was "very well now," she warned about the dangers of not taking medical diagnoses(医学诊断) seriously, like she did before.

    Her Instagram post also called attention to two major health topics: the need for living organ donators and the fact that Gomez represents three groups more likely to be diagnosed with lupus and lupus­related kidney disease. Nine out of 10 people diagnosed with lupus are women, and most develop the disease between the ages of 15 to 44. And lupus is two to three times more common among women of color, including Hispanic (西班牙裔)women, according to the Lupus Foundation.

    Raisa is Latin(拉丁人), and Gomez's father is of Mexican origin. While it's not essential that the organ donator and receiver be of the same race, people who share a similar racial background sometimes are better matched, according to data from the United Network for Organ Sharing.