While dog keepers realize their dogs can read their moods accurately, scientists have always been a little doubtful. Now thanks to some researchers at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna, Austria, we finally have some convincing evidence.

    For their study, biologist Corson Miller and his team exposed eleven selected dogs to digital images of women that were either angry or happy. Half the dogs were rewarded for touching the screen when shown a happy face, while the other half got their treat for selecting those that appeared angry.

    Interestingly, the dogs were not provided with the entire face. Some dogs were shown only upper halves while the others observed lower halves. That's because the scientists believe humans show their emotions on their entire face.

    After some training like how to recognize small differences like the wrinkles between the eyes or the changes in their shape that accompany the happy or angry expressions, the dogs were mostly able to identify the correct expression not only on a familiar face but on a strange face. The researchers concluded the dogs were smart enough to read human emotions.

    They also found those being trained to read angry expressions took a longer time to learn. They guess it may be because dogs find angry faces disgusting, causing them to withdraw quickly. However, once the smart dogs realized they were getting rewarded, the trepidation seemed to disappear. In fact, the dogs had such a good time playing the computer "game" that scientists had a hard time keeping them away from the touch screens after the study was completed.

    The researchers also noticed only dogs with a male owner had a harder time understanding the expressions correctly. Since the touchscreen models were all females, this confirmed what has been observed in previous studies—dogs are more efficient at reading facial expressions of people that are the same gender as their owner.

    The plan had been made to create a beautiful nature park with a large man-made lake on the outer parts of the city of Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan Province. However, thanks to a terrible trick played by nature, what the officials have ended up with, is a natural sandy mess!

The government wanted to create a beautiful place where people of this busy industrial city could come to relax. But things did not quite turn out that way—shortly after digging up thousands of tons of sand, the underground water dried up. As a result, the dry sand has changed into a Sahara-like desert. While official reports show that the sand is piled up to 10 meters high, some people say that it is ten times more or about a 100-feet high in certain areas.

    If that is not bad enough, the sand hills that now spread across an area the size of four football fields, have influenced the environment. What's worse is that on windy days, the dry sand moves into the city center, making it almost impossible to drive and forcing people to wear face masks and protective eyewear to prevent the sand from getting into their eyes, nose, and mouth.

    In an act of trying to keep the sand and provide the illusion(幻想) of green fields, the officials have even tried covering it with a green plastic netting. However, that has not done much to improve the terrible situation!

    As you can imagine, many of Zhengzhou's residents are upset by the disaster. They think that desert wasteland that looks nothing like the green landscape they were promised, has resulted in polluting their pleasant city environment. Some think it is even stopping businessmen from coming to the city.

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    Noah Webster was born on October 16, 1758, in the West Division of Hartford. At that time, few people went to college, but Noah loved to learn so his parents let him go to Yale, Connecticut's only college. He left for New Haven in 1774. Noah's years at Yale were the years of the Revolutionary War.

    Sometimes 70 children of all ages were in one-room schoolhouses with no desks, poor books, and untrained teachers. Noah did not like that. Their books came from England. Noah thought that Americans should learn from American books, so in 1783, Noah wrote his own textbook: A Grammatical Institute of the English Language.

    For 100 years, Noah's book taught children how to read, spell, and pronounce words. It was the most popular American book of its time. Ben Franklin used Noah's book to teach his granddaughter to read.

    When Noah was 43, he started writing the first American dictionary. He did this because Americans in different parts of the country spelled, pronounced and used words differently. He thought that all Americans should speak the same way. He also thought that Americans should not speak and spell just like the English. Noah used American spellings like “color” instead of the English “colour”, “music” instead of “musick” and “center” instead of “centre”. He also added American words that weren't in English dictionaries like “skunk” and “squash”. It took him over 27 years to write his book. When finished in 1828, Noah's dictionary had 70,000 words in it.

    Noah did many things in his life. He worked for copyright laws, wrote textbooks, Americanized the English language, and edited (编辑) magazines. When Noah Webster died in 1843, he was regarded an American hero.

Mark Twain's First Money

      Mark Twain was asked one day if he could remember the first money he ever earned. He thought a long time and then said, "Yes, it was at school. I can remember everything about it. School boys in those days did not take good care of their chairs and desks. There was a rule in our school that if anyone damaged his desk or chair, he would have to pay five dollars or the teacher would beat him in front of the whole school."

    "One day I damaged my desk in some way, I had to pay five dollars or be beaten before the whole school. My father said it would be too bad to have our family disgraced in front of the whole school. He agreed to give me five dollars to hand over the teacher. But before he gave me the money, he took me upstairs and gave me a beating."

    "But as I had one beating and I decided I would take another beating at school and keep the five dollars. So that's what I did. That was the first money I ever earned."

    Have you ever run into a careless cell phone user on the street? Perhaps they were busy talking, texting or checking updates on WeChat without looking at what was going on around them. As the number of this new “species” of human has kept rising, they have been given a new name — phubbers（低头族）.

    Recently, a cartoon created by students from China Central Academy of Fine Arts put this group of people under the spotlight. In the short film, phubbers with various social identities bury themselves in their phones. A doctor plays with his cell phone while letting his patient die, a pretty woman takes selfie（自拍照）in front of a car accident site, and a father loses his child without knowing about it while using his mobile phone. A chain of similar events eventually leads to the destruction of the world.

    Although the ending sounds overstated, the damage phubbing can bring is real. Your health is the first to bear the effect and result of it. “Constantly bending your head to check your cell phone could damage your neck,” Guangming Daily quoted doctors as saying. “the neck is like a rope that breaks after long-term stretching.” Also, staring at cell phones for long periods of time will damage your eyesight gradually, according to the report.

    But that's not all. Being a phubber could also damage your social skills and drive you away from your friends and family. At reunions with family or friends, many people tend to stick to their cell phones while others are chatting happily with each other and this creates a strange atmosphere, Qilu Evening News reported.

    It can also cost you your life. There have been lots of reports on phubbers who fell to their death, suffered accidents, and were robbed of their cell phones in broad daylight.

    Parents who help their children with homework may actually be bringing down their school grades. Other forms of parental involvement, including volunteering at school and observing a child's class, also fail to help, according to the most recent study on the topic.

    The findings challenge a key principle of modern parenting(养育子女) where schools expect them to act as partners in their children's education. Previous generations concentrated on getting children to school on time, fed, dressed and ready to learn.

    Keith Robinson, the author of the study, said, "I really don't know if the public is ready for this but there are some ways parents can be involved in their kids' education that leads to declines in their academic performance. One of the things that were consistently negative was parents' help with homework." Robinson suggested that may be because parents themselves struggle to understand the tasks. "They may either not remember the material their kids are studying now, or in some cases never learn it themselves, but they're still offering advice."

    Robinson assessed parental involvement performance and found one of the most damaging things a parent could do was to punish their children for poor marks. In general, about 20% of parental involvement was positive, about 45% negative and the rest statistically insignificant.

    Common sense suggests it was a good thing for parents to get involved because "children with good academic success do have involved parents", admitted Robinson. But he argued that this did not prove parental involvement was the root cause of that success. "A big surprise was that Asian American parents whose kids are doing so well in school hardly involved. They took a more reasonable approach, conveying to their children how success at school could improve their lives."