Smart phones are so common these days. It's a wonder that our pets don't own one. But they don't necessarily have to. These four apps will help you take care of your best furry friend from dog training to first aid.

Pet First Aid

Price: $3.99

    Pet First Aid helps you provide the basic care and attention that your four-legged friend might need in a medical emergency. The application shows owners how to treat illnesses with helpful videos, pictures and articles on subjects like cuts, wound treatment and more. A section called Pet Info lets you enter in information about your pets including when they had their last vaccinations, any medicines they take, or information about any diseases or conditions your animal suffers from.

Paw Card Pet Tracker

Price: Free

    Paw Card helps you keep a record of your loved one's important information. Use it to record your pet's medical contacts, vaccinations, identity cards, medical conditions and medicines. Additional characteristics include a drawing showing your dog's weight over time.

Dog Park Finder

Price: Free

    Dog Park Finder helps you locate dog-friendly parks and training locations in your area(USA)locations only). The app includes in formation on more than 2,200 off-leash(无需给狗拴链的) areas, user photos and more than 6，500 reviews, so you can have fun with your dog off the leash.

Dog Book

Price: Free

    Dog Book is a social networking application for dogs. Like Face book, users can share with other people what's going on in their dog's life, share photos, and find great animal-friendly places to meet up.

    A German study suggests that people who were too optimistic about their future actually faced greater risk of disability or death within 10 years than those pessimists who expected their future to be worse.

    The paper, published this March in Psychology and Aging, examined health and welfare surveys from roughly 40,000 Germans between ages 18 and 96. The surveys were conducted every year from 1993 to 2003.

    Survey respondents (受访者) were asked to estimate their present and future life satisfaction on a scale of 0 to 10, among other questions.

    The researchers found that young adults (age 18 to 39) routinely overestimated their future life satisfaction, while middle-aged adults (age 40 to 64) more accurately predicted how they would feel in the future. Adults of 65 and older, however, were far more likely to underestimate their future life satisfaction. Not only did they feel more satisfied than they thought they would, the older pessimists seemed to suffer a lower ratio (比率) of disability and death for the study period.

     “We observed that being too optimistic in predicting a better future than actually observed was associated with a greater risk of disability and a greater risk of death within the following decade,” wrote Frieder R. Lang, a professor at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.

    Lang and his colleagues believed that people who were pessimistic about their future may be more careful about their actions than people who expected a rosy future.

     “Seeing a dark future may encourage positive evaluations of the actual self and may contribute to taking improved precautions (预防措施),” the authors wrote.

    Surprisingly, compared with those in poor health or who had low incomes, respondents who enjoyed good health or income were associated with expecting a greater decline. Also, the researchers said that higher income was related to a greater risk of disability.

    The authors of the study noted that there were limitations to their conclusions. Illness, medical treatment and personal loss could also have driven health outcomes.

    However, the researchers said a pattern was clear. “We found that from early to late adulthood, individuals adapt their expectations of future life satisfaction from optimistic, to accurate, to pessimistic,” the authors concluded.

    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.”

    Here is an astonishing and significant fact: Mental work alone can't make us tired. It sounds absurd. But a few years ago, scientists tried to find out how long the human brain could labor without reaching a stage of fatigue(疲劳). To the amazement of these scientists, they discovered that blood passing through the brain, when it is active, shows no fatigue at all! If we took a drop of blood from a day laborer, we would find it full of fatigue toxins(毒素)and fatigue products. But if we took blood from the brain of an Albert Einstein, it would show no fatigue toxins at the end of the day.

    So far as the brain is concerned, it can work as well and swiftly at the end of eight or even twelve hours of effort as at the beginning. The brain is totally tireless. So what makes us tired?

    Some scientists declare that most of our fatigue comes from our mental and emotional(情感的)attitudes. One of England's most outstanding scientists, J. A. Hadfield, says, "The greater part of the fatigue from which we suffer is of mental origin. In fact, fatigue of purely physical origin is rare. "Dr. Brill, a famous American scientist, goes even further. He declares, "One hundred percent of the fatigue of a sitting worker in good health is due to emotional problems. "

    What kinds of emotions make sitting workers tired? Joy? Satisfaction? No! A feeling of being bored, anger, anxiety, tenseness, worry, a feeling of not being appreciated—those are the emotions that tire sitting workers. Hard work by itself seldom causes fatigue. We get tired because our emotions produce nervousness in the body.

    Author Avi, winner of a Newbery Award, a Scott O'Dell Historical Fiction Award, and several Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards, may have seen his first children's book published in 1970, but that doesn't mean he's lost his talent for connecting with young fans.

    The American writer, born in 1937, agrees that getting involved with his readers is one of the key reasons he keeps writing, and that he's been fortunate enough to hear directly from readers about the impact (影响) his books have had. “I have been touched many times by readers who find some special connection between their lives and something I have written: the Danish girl who read something of mine in Danish, and struggled to communicate that in her poor English; the autistic (自闭症的) boy who somehow found something meaningful about my books that reached his own inner life; the women who have told me how important The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle was to them when growing up."

    Beyond his fans' questions about the characters he's created, the writer's most commonly heard question may be about his own use of the single name “Avi." “As a young adult, I was a reader of French literature, which has that one name tradition: Moliere, Racine, Anouilh, Gide, and so on," he explains. “Avi was given to me by my twin sister when we were very young children, and it stuck. Then my family discouraged me from taking up writing as a career because they considered my writing poor. By using Avi, I was showing my determination to them."

    Although he believes－and has the awards to show－that his writing skills have improved, writing still doesn't come easily to him, despite having over sixty books to his credit. “I never studied writing in any formal sense. I taught myself to write by reading, and by imitating what I was reading," he says.

    The writing task may be tough, but the payoff is big. “To create, share, and support the gift of reading and literature, is to give young people the gift of many worlds, within and without," Avi states.

    On a hot summer weekend, Jorge Ayub saw the public beach north of Boston already crowded with nearly 1 million people drawn to the annual sand sculpture festival. Traffic on the nearby road was heavy, bands played music loudly, and later that night fireworks would light up the beach.

    And on the sand were four pairs of tiny shorebirds. These chicks(小鸟) were still too young to fly and a precious addition to the national endeavor to save a bird once down to 139 pairs in Massachusetts. It was Mr. Ayub's job. "Everyone made it," Ayub, a coastal ecologist reported at the end of the long weekend over the nests.

    Once common, piping plovers(笛鸻) were hunted and then squeezed out of their habitats(栖息地) by coastal development until, in 1986, the federal government listed the Atlantic Coastal birds as threatened. The bird's recovery has been halting. After three decades, the Atlantic population stands just under the 2,000-pair goal set by federal law.

    But the star has been Massachusetts, which has seen plovers increase to 687pairs from 139 pairs in 1986. One reason for that: "chick-sitting" in which conservationists sometimes spend all day watching over the birds.

    That progress has made Massachusetts the only East Coast state that decided to relax some Endangered Species Act restrictions: for example, to reduce the fenced-off areas and vehicle limits that have annoyed residents(居民).

    “Look at the stretch(一片土地), "Anyb says. "We had six nesting pairs between here and that bathhouse 600 yards away. By regulation, each nest should have 100 yards of fencing. We could have put up fencing and closed the beach all the way to the bathhouse."

    Instead, the plovers are surrounded in much smaller areas by "symbolic fencing". None of the 52 seawall entrances to the beach are closed. "If we put up too much fencing, people will be upset, and they are going to destroy it or walk right through the nesting areas," Ayub says. "By opening the beach, people are happier and the species does better."