Mary and her husband Jim had a dog named “Lucky”．Whenever Mary and Jim had friends come for a weekend visit，they would warn their friends not to leave their luggage open because Lucky would steal something from their luggage and he always hid his finds in his toy box in the basement.

    It happened that Mary found out she had breast cancer.She felt she was going to die of this disease.The night before she was to go to the hospital，a thought struck her，“What would happen to Lucky？” “If I die，who will look after Lucky？” Mary thought.The thought made her sadder than thinking of her own death.

    Mary stayed in the hospital for two weeks.Jim took Lucky for his evening walk every day，but the little dog just looked sad and miserable.

    Finally the day came for Mary to leave the hospital.When she arrived home，Mary was so tired that she couldn't even make it up the steps to her bedroom.Jim made his wife comfortable on the bed and left her to sleep.

    Lucky stood watching Mary but he didn't come to her when she called.It made Mary sad.But she felt so sleepy that soon she fell asleep.

    When Mary woke，for a second she couldn't understand what was wrong.She couldn't move her head and her body felt heavy.But panic(惊慌) soon gave way when Mary realized the problem.She was enclothed with a blanket，and with every treasure Lucky owned!

    While she had slept，the sorrowing dog had made trip after trip to the basement bringing his beloved hostess all his favorite things.He had covered her with his love.

    It's been 12 years now and Mary is still living.Lucky? He still steals treasures and hides them in his toy box but Mary remains his greatest treasure.

    Do you often feel lonely? What do you do when you feel that way? Hide yourself away and spend your time reading, watching TV or walking around?

    You might think that feeling lonely is just like feeling happy, sad or scared — that it's just one of your various moods. That is true. However, if you let yourself be lonely for too long without dealing with it, you could be making a serious mistake.

    Doctors have known for some time that feeling lonely is bad for the mind. It can lead to mental health problems such as depression, stress and reduce confidence. "Being lonely means not feeling connected or cared for, but it's not about being mentally alone," Lisa Jaremka, scientist from Ohio State University, US, told Live Science in January. And there's growing evidence that not having friends is connected with physical illness as well.

    In 2006, for example, scientists studied 2,800 women who had cancer. They found that those who had few friends or family were five times more likely to die of their disease than women with many social contacts. Also, even healthy people had a better chance of falling ill if they felt left out by others, according to the BBC.

    The results have scientists thinking that loneliness might hurt the immune system（免疫系统）, which protects the body from diseases.

    Hoping to prove this theory, Jaremka and her research team put volunteers（志愿者） through a stress test. During the test, volunteers were asked to make an unprepared speech in front of a group of stony-faced people. The researchers found that volunteers who said they were lonely in their daily lives felt more stress during the test. And their blood samples showed that all the stress had managed to cause harmful changes to their immune system.

     "Loneliness has been thought of in many ways as a chronic stressor（慢性增压器） — a socially painful situation that can last for quite a long time," explained Jaremka, who led the study.

    The number of people suffering from loneliness is increasing all over the world. However, solving the problem is easier said than done. It won't work to just "tell anyone to go out and find someone to love you", said Jaremka. "We need to create support networks."

    If you could change your child's DNA in the future to protect them against diseases, would you? It could be possible because of technology known as CRISPR-Cas, or just CRISPR.

    CRISPR involves a piece of RNA, a chemical messenger, designed to work on one part of DNA; it also uses an enzyme (酶) that can take unwanted genes out and put new ones in, according to The Economist. There are other ways of editing DNA, but CRISPR will do it very simply, quickly, and exactly.

    The uses of CRISPR could mean that cures are developed for everything from Alzheimer's to cancer to HIV. By allowing doctors to put just the right cancer-killing genes into a patient's immune system, the technology could help greatly.

    In April scientists in China said they had tried using CRISPR to edit the genomes (基因组) of human embryos. Though the embryos would never turn into humans, this was the first time anyone had ever tried to edit DNA from human beings. With this in mind, the US' National Academy of Sciences plans to discuss questions about CRISPR's ethics (伦理问题).

    For example, CRISPR doesn't work properly yet. As well as cutting the DNA it is looking for, it often cuts other DNA, too. In addition, we currently seem to have too little understanding of what DNA gives people what qualities.

There are also moral questions around “playing God”. Of course, medicine already stops natural things from happening —— for example, it saves people from infections. The opportunities to treat diseases make it hard to say we shouldn't keep going.

    A harder question is whether it is ever right to edit human germ-line (种系) cells and make changes that are passed on to children. This is banned in 40 countries and restricted in many others. However, CRISPR means that if genes can be edited out, they can also be edited back in. It may be up to us as a society to decide when and where editing the genome is wrong.

    Also, according to The Economist, gene editing may mean that parents make choices that are not obviously in the best interests of their children: “Deaf parents may prefer their children to be deaf too; parents might want to make their children more intelligent at all costs.”

    In the end, more research is still needed to see what we can and can't do with CRISPR. “It's still a huge mystery how we work,” Craig Mello, a UMass Medical School biologist and Nobel Prize winner, told The Boston Globe. “We're just trying to figure out this amazingly complicated thing we call life.”

    Because of the financial crisis in the US and UK, college students are beginning to struggle to find ways to pay their tuition fees and accommodations.

    Recently, two major US student loan (贷款) lenders, Citibank and JPMorgan Chase, announced they were leaving the student loan industry altogether. Because banks currently have a lack of credit, they are reluctant to offer students low-interest loans that need a several-year wait for any return of interest.

    In the US, many undergraduates fill up their financial needs with a private loan, although the majority can get government-funded loans. In the 2015-2016 academic year, $ 17 billion in private student loans was used to finance higher education. The lack of private funding has yet to be covered and will hit many US students hard.

    Across the Atlantic, UK students have been less troubled by the crisis. Most undergraduates in the UK cover their university expenses with government-funded loans and grants. Their biggest concern is a sudden increase in student rent.

    Most young professionals now rent houses, since 80 percent of UK mortgage schemes (按揭计划) have disappeared—a direct result of the credit crisis. This has boosted the house rent market.

    In large cities, UK students are paying almost 6.5 percent more in rent than the previous year. Figures from the UK organization Accommodation for Student show students in big cities such as London paying an average weekly rent of $ 203.

    Yet, despite students' suffering, the number of this year's university applications is expected to grow. During economic slumps, people regard further education as a way to survive tough job market.

    In many businesses, computers have largely replaced paperwork, because they are fast, and do not make mistakes. And they are honest. Many banks say that their business is “untouched by human hands” and therefore safe. But they have no thought that the growing number of computer crimes (犯罪) show they can be used to steal.

    Computer criminals (罪犯) don't use guns. And even if they are caught, it is hard to punish them because there is often no proof. A computer cannot remember who used it. It simply does what it is told. The head teller(出纳主管) at a New York City bank used a computer to steal more than one and a half billion dollars in just four years. No one noticed this because he moved the money from one account (账户) to another. Each time a customer whose money he had stolen questioned the balance in his account, the teller said it was a computer mistake, then replaced the missing money from someone else's account. This man was caught at last.

    Some workers use the computer's power to punish their bosses they consider unfair. Recently, a large company fired its computer record assistant for reasons that were connected with her personal life rather than her job. She was given thirty days notice. In those thirty days, she stole all the company's computerized records.

    Most computer criminals have been common workers. Now police wonder if this is “the tip of iceberg”. As one official says, “I have the feeling that there is more crime out there than we are catching. What we are seeing now is all so poorly done. I wonder what the real experts are doing—the ones who really know a computer works.”

    During the first decade of the 21st century, a popular and new word has come into our vocabulary. That word is Facebook. This is the most popular social networking website on the Internet. There are about 350 million active users on this website. The main idea of Facebook is that you can keep in touch with all your friends around the world who has Facebook. In the 350 million users on Facebook, 67% of them are between the ages of 13-25. More than 35 million users update their status every day. 2.5 billion Photos are added each month.

    The highest age groups who use Facebook are teenagers. Most of them keep the website running whenever they are using the computer and general teens nowadays are always on the computer, if they aren't in school or when they aren't asleep. I feel that teens should focus on their schoolwork or be socializing with their friends in person or exercising. Facebook is just changing the new generation of youngsters completely because the teenage life is one of the most important stages of life and wasting it on Facebook is not encouraging this in any way. It is also a complete distraction (分心) to their mind, for they would turn to Facebook just to check if there was anything updated among their friends.

    Remember back in the good old days, when teens would do their homework handwritten, play sports and hang out with friends. Today, most teens would only speak to their friends on Facebook, while we can see them battling obesity as they stare at their friend's message on their wall. In summary, teens don't have a life because they are on Facebook 24/7, except for those who don t use Facebook or occasionally do.

    Facebook is also where people can see the conflicts among their friends, virtual arguments, relationship status and updates, who is in whose 'top friends, and so on. You can join groups, post pictures and videos, play games, and invite friends to parties. Mainly, all this would just disturb people into living life to its fullest.