Dust on furniture may be bad news for waistlines (腰围). But it's far too early to add dusting to a weight-loss plan. Dietary fats and other materials that make up indoor dust can send a signal to human fat cells, telling them to grow. That process, in turn, might slow the body's rate of burning energy. Such changes could add to any weight problems a person might have.

    “We don't know what that means to long-term health and certain diseases yet,” says Heather Stapleton, one of the study's authors. But she notes that her team's findings also raise a question of whether pollutants in dust might play some role in the growing, global problem of obesity (肥胖).

    Stapleton and her colleagues collected dust from homes and offices. Studies found that some materials in the dust could turn on a protein (蛋白质) called PPAR-gamma 1. It's found in many human tissues. Turning this protein on can cause fat cells to grow. Researchers think this protein may be involved in obesity. But a second study now finds evidence that certain fats are mostly to blame. Cooking oils may send out some of these fats into the air, where they eventually find their way into house dust. Or, the authors say, the fats might enter house dust as part of the hair or skin cells shed (脱落) by people or pets.

    “While the findings are amazing,” says Mitchell Lazar, another study author, “these findings need to be taken as very limited.” Indeed, he adds several cautions about how the findings should be understood. “For one thing, people eat these fats in foods all of the time. That is likely to be a lot more than would be consumed from indoor dust,” he said.

    In Shanghai's Grand Theater, a fashionable, mainly young audience applauds enthusiastically as Guo Yong takes center stage. He holds a large bushy tree branch with leaves. Blowing on one of the leaves, he produces a sound like the singing of birds as he plays a traditional Buyi folk song. Some other musicians are also playing the traditional instruments from various ethnic groups in China.

    It's the first time such music has ever been performed in the Grand Theater. But all this is the efforts of Zhu Zheqin, a Cantonese-born singer; who has made it her mission to help preserve China's traditional ethnic music.

    Several years ago, after being appointed a United Nations Development Program ambassador, Zhu traveled through some of China's remotest regions in an attempt to document the traditional music of various minority groups. In the course other four- month trip, she recorded more than a thousand songs. But she noticed that many of the best musicians were old, and some of the music was at risk of dying out.

    "I was shocked the beauty of what I heard-it was so good," she says. "But it needed support. I hope to let people see the beauty of these things in the contemporary times."

    So Zhu decided to introduce some of the musicians to a wider audience. By doing this, she hopes to rekindle (再次点燃) the interest of the younger generation. "Young people don't like this music much; they prefer pop music and love songs. They think these songs are something their grandma sings. This kind of repackaging gives young people a new door into their heritage."

    Zhu believes China needs to look again at its own roots. "China today is basically all Western art; in our conservatories (音乐学院) Western classical music is the top," she says. "For China to really contribute to the world, we need to go on our own path. So what can represent China today?" The answer, she suggests, is to move from "made in China" to "created in China".

    No one knows how much money Dr. Lyle Tullis gave away to students. I was his colleague for nearly a decade and I never stopped being amazed at his generosity. Our college has a program of providing cross-cultural experiences for students. Lots of students take advantage of summer experiences oversea. I discovered that no group left for overseas without some of its members receiving financial help from Dr. Tullis.

    It wasn't that he made a lot of money. For one thing, he taught in a church-run school. There, his salary (薪水) was half of what those people earned in a tax-supported school.

    Other colleagues occasionally complained about the low pay. Not Lyle Tullis. Occasionally some professors would leave our campus for a better-paid position. They told me they did so because, with better pay, they could provide for their families.

    The size of Lyle Tullis' paycheck never seemed to be the most important thing to him. I realized that one day when I was thanking him for helping a student, his eyes shone as he said to me, "I've got so much money that I don't know what to do with it. So, I just give it away."

    Most people wouldn't have thought that way. Dr. Tullis drove one of the oldest cars on campus. It was even older than almost any of the students' cars. His home, while comfortable, was not fancy at all. But Lyle Tullis lived with the feeling that he had so much money that he needed to give it away.

    He was one of the favorite on campus. Cynics (愤世嫉俗) might say he bought fame. But they would misunderstand. Lyle wanted to devote his life, all of it, to helping others.

    New study shows that when teachers participate in a training program focused on prosocial (亲社会的) classroom behavior, their students are better able to control their emotions, and that children who can regulate emotions are more likely to be academically successful.

    For the study, which appears in Prevention Science, researchers looked at more than 100 teachers and 1,817 students from kindergarten to third grade to see if teachers could support students' emotional and behavioral growth through the Incredible Years Teacher Classroom Management (IYTCM) program.

    The program uses videos and training sessions, along with role-playing and coaching, to help teachers learn management skills such as using behavior-specific praise, building positive relationships with students, and considering how to reduce poor behavior. Teachers in the training group increased interactions with students by 64 percent compared with 53 percent for teachers in the control group without the training.

    "Emotional regulation is the ability to recognize what behavior is appropriate in the present situation," says Wendy Reinke, professor in the College of Education at the University of Missouri. "For example, a student might have difficulty controlling the feeling of anger if he or she becomes annoyed with another student. But under this program, the teacher encourages them to move to a different spot in the classroom, effectively teaching them that sometimes stepping away and taking a break is a good way to calm down and manage8ha8feeling."

    After one school year of using the program in classrooms, students improved their social ability and ability to regulate their emotions. These improvements resulted in an increase in the tests for students in Incredible Years classrooms vs. students in control classrooms. And this classroom management approach can help reduce the risk for struggling learners early on, which could help prevent more accumulative support needs in a child's future.

    I want to talk about a soldier. I saw him yesterday as my husband and I were enjoying a wonderful lunch in the cave-like dining room of an old hotel.

    It is hard to imagine being comfortable in a room that probably seats a thousand, but the real magic of the place is its wonderful setting. Every comer is a wood and stone masterpiece, with high glass windows that look out to the huge cliffs of the valley.

    A man entered with his family and took a seat. He wasn't in uniform, but he walked with the dignity of a soldier, and a slight limp (瘸). My suspicion was confirmed when he removed his hat and placed it on the table where I could see it. Embroidered (绣) on the cap were the words: "Iwo Jima Survivor".

    As they were waiting for lunch, the others talking happily, this gentleman was stating out of the window. He was content to be left out of the conversation and allowed to take in the wonderful and impressive view of the waterfall.

    I watched him, and imagined how much horror he had seen in the war. What losses did he suffer, and how many friends did he lose? What he had witnessed should have given him a good reason to lose faith in the world. Yet this tired soldier was smiling at the sky, at the sun and the roaring of the waterfall. Somehow, after everything, the world was still beautiful to him.

    I walked over to him and said, "Excuse me, sir. I'm sorry to interrupt, but I saw your hat, and I just wanted to say thank you for serving."

    He looked up at me, surprised, and said proudly, "You're welcome, and thank you, too."

    I told him I would go home and tell my children about this experience that I'd met him.

    From quiet paths by a stream in a forest to busy roads running through a city, people have created various forms of routes in different places. These now exist all around us, and their use is imperative for societies. These routes have enabled people to move, transport things, and send information from one place to another quickly and safely. Throughout history, they have been important in our daily lives.

    Early routes were often formed naturally on land. They gradually developed over long periods of time while people traveled them on foot or horseback. A significant turning point in their history arrived when the first wheeled carts appeared in ancient times. Once this happened, people recognized the importance of well-maintained routes. Therefore, towns, cities, and entire countries improved them. As a result, life became more convenient, communities grew, economies evolved, and cultures expanded.

    People have established routes on water, too. Rivers and canals have served as effective routes for people to move around and carry things. For instance, in the old, Japanese city of Edo, water routes were used for the transportation of agricultural products, seafood, and wood. People have also opened routes across the sea. The seaways were critical for the navigation of ships, particularly in the days when they moved mainly by wind power. Using these sea routes, people could travel great distances, and go to places they had not previously been able to reach.

    People have gone on to open routes in the sky as well. Since the invention of the airplane, they have made it possible to travel long distances easily. Eventually, people became able to travel safely and comfortably high in the sky, and going vast distances only took a small amount of time.

    Today, we have a new type of route, the Internet. By using this worldwide route, people can easily obtain information that once was available mainly from books and face-to-face communication. They can also instantly send messages to large numbers of people all at once.

    As long as there have been people, there have been routes to connect them. Currently unknown routes will surely take us even further in the future.