WeChat is a social mobile application with voice and text messaging timeline and several social features like ‘Message in a Bottle'. WeChat, a popular instant messaging tool run by Tencent Holdings, aims to help users access mobile services without downloading separate apps, which experts said may challenge the business of smartphone app distributors such Apple Store.

This new feature, named ‘Mini Programs', allows WeChat users to find a variety of services such as ticket buying by scanning a QR (quick-response) code, saving them the trouble of installing a number of different apps on smart devices, according to the transcript of a speech by Zhang Xiaolong, Tencent's senior executive vice president, on Wednesday. The new function is expected to come online on January 9.

    Zhang, known as the father of WeChat, emphasized that ‘Min Programs' is not a mobile app distributing function.

    Still, experts and app developers said that the rollout (推出) of ‘Mini Programs' on WeChat will erode the market share of app distributors like Apple Store in China.

     “‘Mini Programs' will attract lots of start-ups, because a program based on WeChat can help them build up businesses at much lower costs,” a Shanghai-based app developer, told the Global Times Wednesday.

    If a start-up wants to promote its business via a separate application, it has to hire a special team to develop two different apps— one each for iOS and Android.

    Lsiunched in 2011, WeChat has evolved to include services such as ‘Order Taxi', ‘Food Delivery', e-commerce and payments from just an instant messaging app.

    My grandparents believed that you were either honest or you were not. They had a simple saying hanging on their living-room wall: “Life is like a field of newly fallen snow. Where I choose to walk every step will show.” They didn't have to talk about it; they showed this truth by the way they lived.

    They understood that honesty is an inner(内部的) standard for judging your behavior. Unfortunately, honesty is in short supply today. But it is the real bottom line in every area of society and a discipline (自制能力) we must demand of ourselves.

    There's a story told about a surgical nurse's first day on the medical team at a well-known hospital. She was responsible(负责) for all surgical instruments and materials during an operation. At the end of the operation, the nurse said to the doctor, “ You've only removed 11 sponges（海绵）, and we used 12. We need to find the last one.”

    “I removed them all,” the doctor assured her. “ No, you didn't , sir,” insisted the nurse. “ Think of the patient.”

    Smiling, the doctor lifted his foot and showed the nurse the twelfth sponge.

    So when you know you're right, you can't yield. Don't be afraid of those who might have a better idea or who might even be more intelligent than you are.

    Self-respect and a clear awareness (意识)of right and wrong are powerful parts of honesty and are the basis for enriching your relationships with others. Honesty means you do what you do because it's right and not just fashionable or politically correct. A life of principle, of not easily yielding, will always take you forward. My grandparents taught me that.

    Popular music in America is what every student likes. Students carry small radios with earphones and listen to music before class, after class, and at lunch. Students with cars buy large speakers and play the music loudly as they drive on the street.

    Adult drivers listen to music on the car radio as they drive to work. They also listen to the news about sports, the weather, and the life of American people. Most of the radio programs are music.

    Pop or popular music singers make much money. They make a CD or tape which radio stations use in many places. Once the popular singer is heard all over the country, young people buy his or her tapes. Some of the money from these tapes goes to the singer. Wherever the singer goes, all the young people want to meet him or her. Now the singer has become a national star.

    There are other kinds of music that are important to Americans. One is called folk music. It tells stories about the common life of Americans. Another is called western or country music. This is started by cowboys who would sing at night to the cows they were watching.

    A team of researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago found that too many kids are eating too much pizza and too many calories are doing harm to children's health.

    "There are a lot of takeaways from the study. But the biggest thing is that parents are serving their kids too much pizza," said Dr. William Dietz, one of the study's authors and the director of the Sumner M. Redstone Global Center for Prevention and Wellness at the Milken Institute of Public Health at the George Washington University.

    The researchers used data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which tracked the diets of more than 11,000 children and teenagers. Researchers figured how many children eat pizza in the United States, how often they eat it, and how much they eat when they do.

    Pizza, pretty alarmingly, is the second leading source of calories in the diets of America's children, next only to grain desserts, such as cookies and other sweets. On any given day, roughly 20 percent of all children aged 2 to 11 and adolescents aged 12 to 19 eat pizza. And when they do, they eat a lot of it. When children eat pizza, they eat roughly 400 calories, according to the study. For teenagers, it's upwards of 600 calories.

    All that is pretty problematic, according to Dietz largely because kids don't tend to balance the pizza slices with salads, vegetables and other more nutritional(有营养的) foodstuffs. Days on which children and teenagers eat pizza are not only associated with considerably higher intakes of fat, but also, quite simply, with more food: on average, children consume 84 extra calories on the days they eat pizza, while adolescents consume an extra 230 calories.

    "When you eat extra calories and don't compensate(抵偿) for them at another point of the day or week, it can lead to weight gain and even obesity." Dietz said.

    There is a Silver lining. Pizza consumption is still too high by nutrition standards, but it's lower than it used to be. Consumption(消费) fell by roughly 25 percent between 2007 and 2016, according to the study. Much of that has come at dinner where it's fallen by 40 percent for children and about 33 percent for teenagers. It's unclear whether the decline has been in connection with a growing concern over obesity, especially among the country's youth.

    But the drop in pizza consumption, while significant hasn't been big enough "It's a positive trend," Dietz said. "But we're not quite them yet."

    It's easy to see the appeal of pizza. It's cheap. Parents can buy a lot of pizza for not a lot of money. Besides, they can buy pizza from a chain shop, a mom-and-pop store or a grocery freezer. And it's universally loved. The estimated 3 billion pizza eaten each year in the United States is a proof of the food's unmatched popularity. Given how much the country loves pizza, what's to be done? Dietz suggests pizza with smaller serving sizes and healthier toppings(配料). "We're not suggesting that kids avoid pizza altogether." said Dietz. "But when parents serve it, it's important that they understand it's extremely caloric. They should serve smaller pizza, or at least smaller slices."

    When asked about her childhood in the documentary Alive Inside, a 90-year-old woman with dementia(痴呆) replies, "I've forgotten so much." Filmmaker Michael Rossato-Bennett then plays music from her past for her. “That's Louis Armstrong,” she says. “He's singing When the Saints Go Marching In and it takes me back to my school days.” She then recalls exact details from her life.

Why does it happen? Music tends to accompany events that arouse emotions or otherwise make strong impressions on us — such as weddings and graduations. These kinds of experiences form strong memories, and the music and memories likely become intertwined(紧密相连) in our neural(神经的) networks, according to Julene Johnson, a professor at the University of California. Movements, such as dancing, also often pair with our experience of music, which can help form memories. Even many years later, hearing the music can bring back memories of these long-past events.

    As Alive Inside shows, music has this power even for many people with dementia. Researchers note that the brain areas that process and remember music are typically less damaged by dementia than other areas, and they think it may explain the phenomenon.

    They also pay attention to elderly people with dementia, especially those in nursing homes. "It's possible those long-term memories are still there," Johnson says, “but people just have a harder time accessing them because they're in a strange place and there are not a lot of circumstances in which someone could pull out those memories.”

    Johnson also notes that music is not universally useful for all people with dementia since there are some people with dementia whose brain area that recognizes music is damaged.

    Despite music's apparent benefits, few studies have explored its influence on memory recall in people with dementia. “It's really an untapped area,” Johnson says. Petr Janata is one researcher investigating the topic of music and memory. He says that scientists still do not have the answers for why and how music reawakens memories in people with dementia, but this phenomenon is real and it's just a matter of time before it's fully borne out by scientific research.

    On December 26, 2004, hundreds of tourists relaxed on Sri Lanka's Yala National Park's beaches. But at mid-morning the park's elephants began crying wildly and running away from the ocean and up a nearby hill. The puzzled keepers could tell the animals were worried about something but what?

    What the keepers did not know was that a 30-foot wall of water was headed straight toward them. This tsunami(海啸) had been caused by an earthquake more than 1, 000 miles away in the Indian Ocean. When the huge wave hit the coast, it caused severe damage. Many people died. The elephants, however, were not swept away by the water. They stood safely on the hill.

    Scientists have long suspected that animals sense natural disasters before humans do. People have told stories of dogs refusing to go outside and sharks swimming to deeper waters before a hurricane. After the 2004 tsunami, people said they saw tigers, monkeys, and water buffalo escaping to higher ground before the waters rushed in. Even in the hardest-hit areas of southern Asia, there were few animal deaths.

    It's unlikely that an animal's so-called sixth sense comes from some magical power to see into the future. Experts believe that animals may be more sensitive than humans to changes in temperature and other environmental conditions that take place before a natural disaster. The elephants in Sri Lanka, for example, may have picked up vibrations from within the Earth, a sign that earthquake was coming. Because vibrations in the ground travel much faster than an ocean wave, the elephants may have felt the earthquake that caused the tsunami well before the tsunami itself came to the coast.

    A few scientists are calling for a system to track reports of strange behavior in people's pets, hoping that these reports can serve as a warning system that a natural disaster is about to happen. But Marina Haynes, an animal behavior scientist at the Philadelphia Zoo, says, "It would be an unreliable way to predict disasters. It can be difficult to know what an animal is doing. Is the animal nervous because an earthquake is about to happen or is it frightened because there is an enemy nearby?"