I was a shy girl. I didn't even like to answer the telephone for fear I'd have to talk to somebody I didn't know. I enjoyed the loneliness of exploring nature. However, at school I had to spend all day in the company of others. My escape was reading. I spent a lot of time studying and was rewarded with good grades. My only failure was Spanish—I'd get all. As on my written work and tests, but Ds and Fs on the spoken part.

    Eventually I went to college. During my third year of college, I had enough of being shy and determined to change my outlook and behavior. One day while at school, I noticed an advertisement for positions on the local classical music radio station. I had grown up listening to classical music, and I could easily pronounce names such as Tchaikovsky, Albinoni, and Chopin.

    I had absolutely no background in radio, and absolutely no hope of getting the job. The idea of talking to thousands of listeners in “radio land” terrified me. However, I luckily survived the interview. I was given brief descriptions of symphonies（交响乐）and a public service announcement to read, and a list of composers' names to pronounce. It wasn't hard for me. I left the recording session（录音时段）with a sense of relief and a sense of accomplishment. About two weeks later I actually landed the job. It was a challenging job, but I grew to enjoy it greatly. I began to feel comfortable talking to people.

    Although I now spend many hours each week talking with people, I'm still basically a quiet person. Perhaps it is my soft voice and my quiet nature that helps draw people out as they respond to my questions as I interview them. My former shyness is a fortune, as I can relate to people who feel discomfortable when they talk to newspaper reporters. I still enjoy moments of loneliness and the peace found in nature. But I'm also glad I decided to make a change in my life that has opened many doors and opportunities that I never knew existed.

    “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.

    A newly-published study has shown that loneliness can spread from one person to another, like a disease.

    Researchers used information from the Framingham Study, which began in 1948. The Framingham Study gathers information about physical and mental( 心 理 的 ) health, personal behavior and diet. At first, the study involved about 5,000 people in the American state of Massachusetts. Now, more than 12,000 persons are taking part.

    Information from the Framingham Study showed earlier that happiness can spread from person to person. So can behaviors like littering and the ability to stop smoking.

    University of Chicago psychologist (心理学家) John Cacioppo led the recent study. He and other researchers tried to show how often people felt lonely. They found that the feeling of loneliness spread through social groups.

    Having a social connection with a lonely person increased the chances that another person would feel lonely. In fact, a friend of a lonely person was 52% more likely to develop feelings of loneliness. A friend of that person was 25% more likely. The researchers say this shows that a person could indirectly be affected by someone's loneliness.

    The effect was strongest among friends. Neighbors were the second most affected group. The effect was weaker on husbands and wives, and brothers and sisters. The researchers also found that loneliness spread more easily among women than men.

    The New York Times newspaper reports that, on average, people experience feelings of loneliness about 48 days a year. It also found that every additional friend can decrease loneliness by about five percent, or two and a half fewer lonely days.

    Loneliness has been something to do with health problems like sadness and sleeping difficulties. The researchers believe that knowing the causes of loneliness could help in reducing it.

    The study suggests that people can take steps to stop the spread of loneliness. They can do this by helping individuals they know who may be experiencing loneliness. The result can be helpful to the whole social group.

    Since the sex of a sea turtle(海龟)is determined by the heat of sand hatching the eggs, scientists had suspected they might see slightly more females. Climate change, after all, has driven sea temperatures higher, which, in these creatures, favors female children. They found female sea turtles from Raine Island, the Pacific Ocean's largest and most important green sea turtle living area, now outnumber males by at least 116 to 1. "This is extreme," says turtle scientist Camryn Allen.

    Biologist Michael Jensen wanted to know if climate change had already changed turtles' sexes. By using genetic(基因的) tests, he'd figured out that he could follow turtles of all ages. Still, his research data would lack an important detail: sex. Only after a turtle matures is it possible to tell its sex from the outside -- mature males have slightly longer tails. By then turtles can be decades old, so scientists often use Iaparoscopy(腹腔镜检查)，sending a thin tube into each animal, but that's not so practical if you're hoping to examine hundreds of creatures. Fortunately, at a turtle conference, he met Allen, and all she needed was a little blood.

    They compared their results with temperature data for nesting beaches. What worries them is that Raine Island has been producing almost female turtles for at least 20 years. This is no small thing. More than 200,000 turtles come to nest there. During high season, 18,000 turtles may settle in at once. "But what happens in 20 years when there are no more males coming up as adults? Are there enough to maintain the population?" says Allen. They also found cooler beaches in the south are still producing males, but that in the north, it's almost entirely females hatching. These findings clearly point to the fact that climate change is changing many aspects of wildlife biology.

    But how widespread is this phenomenon -- and what is the consequence?

    At a daycare center in Texas, children were playing outside. One of the children was Jessica Mc Clure. She was 18 months old. Her mother, who worked at the daycare center, was watching the children. Suddenly Jessica fell and disappeared. Jessica's mother screamed and ran to her.

    A well was in the yard of the center. The well was only eight inches across and a rock always covered it. But children had moved the rock. When Jessica fell, she fell right into the well.

    Jessica's mother reached inside the well, but she couldn't feel Jessica. She dialed 911 for help. Men from the fire department arrived. They discovered that Jessica was about 20 feet down in the well. For the next hour the men talked and planned Jessica's rescue.

    "We can't go down into the well," they said."It's too narrow. So, we're going to drill a hole next to the well. Then we'll drill a tunnel across to Jessica. When we reach her, we'll bring her through the tunnel and up through our hole."

    The men began to drill the hole at 11 a.m. on Wednesday, October 14, 1987. The men had a difficult job; they were drilling through solid rock. During her days in the well, Jessica sometimes asked for her mother. Sometimes she slept, sometimes she cried and sometimes she sang.

    All over the world, people waited for news of Jessica. Everyone worried about her.

At 8 p.m. on Friday, October 16, men reached Jessica and brought her up from the well. She was soon sent to hospital. Jessica was dirty, hungry, thirsty and tired. Her feet and forehead were badly injured. But Jessica was alive.

    After Jessica's rescue, one of the rescuers made a metal cover for the well, saying," To Jessica, with love from all of us."

Damian Stefaniuk and his colleagues at Massachusetts Institute of Technology （MIT） have developed a novel energy storage device—a supercapacitor— using three basic, inexpensive materials： water, cement, and a soot （煤灰）, which can carry electricity. 

Supercapacitors are highly efficient at storing energy but differ from batteries in some important ways. They can charge much more quickly than a lithium （锂） battery and don't experience the same level of performance decline over time. But supercapacitors also release the power they store rapidly, making them less useful in devices such as mobile phones, laptops or electric cars where a steady supply of energy is needed over an extended period of time. 

Yet according to Stefaniuk, these supercapacitors could make an important contribution to efforts to reduce carbon emissions and make the global economy more environmentally friendly. "If it can be scaled up, the technology can help solve an important issue— the storing of renewable energy," he says. 

He and his fellow researchers at MIT envision several applications for their supercapacitors. One might be to create roads that store solar energy and then release it to recharge electric cars wirelessly as they drive along a road. The rapid release of energy from the supercapacitors would allow vehicles to get a rapid boost to their batteries. Another application would be using supercapacitors in the foundations or walls of houses, so that these parts of the house not only support the structure but also store energy. 

"But it's still early stages. Right now, the supercapacitor made from building materials can only store just under 300 watt-hours per cubic meter, enough to power a 10-watt LED light for 30 hours. The power might seem low compared to regular batteries, but a foundation made from 30-40 cubic meters of this material could meet the daily energy needs of a house," says Stefaniuk. "Since this material is used so widely around the world, it has the potential to be very competitive and useful for energy storage."