Many blind people use guide dogs to help them get safely from place to place and to warn them of danger. But what can blind people do if they are allergic(过敏的) to dogs or just don't like them? For these people, they can turn to the Guide Horse Foundation.

    Janet and Don Burleson founded(成立) the organization in 1999. They began training miniature horses to help guide blind people. Miniature horses look just like common horses, only much smaller. They are generally less than 34 inches tall.

    Cuddles was the foundation's first guide horse in full service. She became 45-year-old Dan Shaw's helper. Shaw has an eye disease and his sight is very poor. One night, while filling out a form to get a guide dog, Shaw heard a news story on TV about people training horses to guide the blind. Shaw loves horses and wanted a guide animal that would live a long time. So he applied(申请)，and a year later, Cuddles and Shaw began training as a team.

    On a trip to New York, Cuddles helped Shaw safely visit many places of interest .They even traveled on a boat and on the subway system.

    Shaw says that he is very lucky to have Cuddles. He believes that Cuddles has changed his life for the better by giving him the chance to do things himself and making him feel much more confident about himself.

    Optimism May Help People Live Longer

People who have an optimistic view on life are more likely to live longer, a US study said Wednesday.

    The study, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, analyzed data from 2004 to 2012 from 70,000 women enrolled in the Nurses' Health Study, a long-running US study tracking women's health via surveys every two years.

    The researchers looked at participants' levels of optimism and other factors that might play a role in how optimism may affect mortality risk, such as race, high blood pressure, diet, and physical activity.

    It found the most optimistic women, or the top 25%, had a nearly 30 percent lower risk of dying from any of the diseases analyzed in the study compared with the least optimistic women, or the bottom 25%.

    The most optimistic women had a 16 percent lower risk of dying from cancer; 38 percent lower risk of dying from heart disease; 39 percent lower risk of dying from stroke; 38 percent lower risk of dying from respiratory disease; and 52 percent lower risk of dying from infection.

    Previous studies have linked optimism with reduced risk of early death from cardiovascular (心脑血管的) problems, but this was the first to find a link between optimism and reduced risk from other major causes.

    “While most medical and public health efforts today focus on reducing risk factors for diseases, evidence has been mounting that enhancing psychological resilience (弹性，复原力) may also make a difference,” said Eric Kim, research fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and co-lead author of the study.

    “Our new findings suggest that we should make efforts to boost optimism, which has been shown to be associated with healthier behaviors and healthier ways of coping with life challenges.”

    The study also found that healthy behaviors only partially explain the link between optimism and reduced mortality risk. One other possibility is that higher optimism directly affects our biological systems, Kim said.

    Co-lead author and postdoctoral research fellow Kaitlin Hagan said optimism can be varied with relatively uncomplicated and low-cost interventions (干预), even things as simple as having people write down and think about the best possible outcomes for various areas of their lives, such as careers or friendships.

    “Encouraging use of these interventions could be an innovative way to enhance health in the future,” Hagan said.

    Research finds out why some people are constantly under attack from the bloodsucking insects while others walk free.

    For those unfortunate enough to feature highly on the mosquito hit list, summer nights can be synonymous with mosquito bites. Yet others hardly ever get bitten. So how do the bloodthirsty insects select their victims?

    The insects' tastes may seem arbitrary. However, research shows that when mosquitoes make their choices between potential victims, it all comes down to scent (气味).

    “Mosquitoes are attracted by carbon dioxide and heat, which everyone gives off. But mosquitoes are also attracted by certain scents,” says Karl-Martin Vagn Jensen, the head of research at the Department of Agricultural Science at Arhus University.

    According to Jensen, it has not yet been confirmed exactly what the scents in question are. But research does indicate that some scents are more attractive to mosquitoes than others.

    “All the lab employees rubbed petri dishes (培养皿) against their stomachs. In that way, their scents were put on the dishes, which were then put in a container full of mosquitoes,” he says. “The mosquitoes repeatedly landed on some of the petri dishes, but didn't go anywhere near the others.”

    Perhaps taking inspiration from popular fiction, there are also those who consider garlic as an excellent repellent (驱虫剂) against the winged bloodsuckers. According to the researcher, this strategy may not be entirely fruitless. “As far as I know, there is no scientific proof that eating garlic works. But there may be something to the theory that it's possible to mask scent with garlic,” he says. The only reliable method of protection against mosquitoes is to use repellents that are sold over the counter. It contains some smells that can confuse the mosquitoes. When the mosquito comes closer, it uses smell, heat and carbon dioxide to decide whether to bite. But if it is confused by a repellent, it will never get that far.

    If conditions get bad enough, almost any kind of weather can become a storm.

Stormy weather can cause people to cancel their plans. It can cause major events to be postponed. And severe stormy weather can be dangerous to people, fortune and anima1.

    If you weather the storm, or ride out the storm, you survive and move on without harm or injury. For example, 1et's talk about Tornado Alley, the name for part of the central United States. During springtime, this area often has a large number of powerful tornadoes. People who live there are taught to shelter in the safest place they can find and wait for the storm to pass. People who live in Tornado Alley are used to weathering many storms!

    You can also weather a storm, but it doesn't involve actual weather. “To weather the storm” can also mean to make it through a difficult experience or trying times. So, if the stock market(股市)crashes, you might have to weather a financial storm.

    Often before a big storm, conditions are calm. The calm before the storm can happen anytime. It is the time before something bad happens. For example, at the beginning of a family reunion, the adults were all talking happily. But the older children knew it was just the calm before the storm. They've seen it happen before. The adults talk happily for about an hour. Then they start arguing about events from the past—things that should really stay buried!

    But after the storm begins and you find yourself in the middle of it, you are in the eye of the storm. In the world of weather, the eye of the storm is the calmest part, in the center of a hurricane, for example. However, in the English language, if you are in the eye of the storm, you are in the most intense part of a conflict. For example, she had no idea that walking into the meeting would put her in the eye of the storm.

    However, a brainstorm does not exist in the world of weather. To brainstorm means to try to solve a problem by talking with other people. And don't worry. If we have trouble thinking of an idea for the next program, we can always brainstorm with you!

    For nearly thirty years I did parent programs in all of the fifty states, and regardless of the community, there was always a shortage of fathers attending, usually by a 10:1 (mothers、 fathers) ratio. Maybe they were all tending to business, and they obviously didn't think school was any of their business.

    The world is now flat. How's that for a sea change? As Thomas Friedman described it in his book The World Is Flat twenty-five years ago, the power structure of the world consisted of highs and lows. The countries with the power and knowledge were at the top of the mountains and the rest were down in the valleys. A handful of countries (the United States, Britain, Germany, and Japan) ruled the world's economy because they monopolize (垄断)the information and power.

    Then came the Internet. Suddenly the countries down in the valleys were connected to the information network and the work flow. These included India, Eastern Europe, South Korea, Brazil, and China. Don't believe it? Walk into a supermarket and pick up any ten toys, checking each for where it was made. My last count: China, ten out of ten. The world's workforce became "flattened". No more disconnected valleys.

    Since 2000, U.S. manufacturing has lost six million jobs, one-third of its workforce, most of them males. For the first time in history, women hold the majority of jobs in the U.S.

    The only people who don't understand the sea change in business are the fathers and sons still clinging to the image of the male who doesn't need to play school—just play ball. It's been thirty years since that idea had any wings, but too many males are still trying to make it fly. Once the only thing that mattered for men was what they could get out of the ground with their hands. Now it's what they can get out of their heads that counts. And without classroom success, today's male faces an impossible challenge from both intelligent women on the home front and foreigners willing to do the same job for less while sitting in an office in Bangalore or Singapore.

    A population of the world's most aggressive mosquito species was almost completely wiped out by an experiment on two islands in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, according to a study published.

    The experiment successfully reduced the female Asian Tiger Mosquito population — the main source of bites and disease spread — by up to 94%, reducing the number of reported human bites by 97%.

    One of the Chinese study's researchers, Xi Zhiyong, a professor at Michigan State University, has been a longtime pioneer in this field of study. Running a mosquito factory in southern China, he previously attempted to use sterilized male mosquitoes to mate with unaltered females which developed normally. In the new study, published by the International Journal of Science, Xi and his colleagues attempted to cut mosquito numbers even further by limiting both males and females' ability to reproduce. The results were so successful that they nearly killed the entire female mosquito population on the two islands.

    It isn't the first attempt by researchers to reduce mosquito populations across the world. In 2018, scientists from the Imperial College of London used gene-editing tools to make female mosquitoes sterile, while males developed normally and continued spreading the genetic mutation (突变).Experts said the Asian Tiger Mosquitoes are particularly hard to kill using traditional population control methods, such as pesticides (杀虫剂) and removing stagnant (不流动的) water where the insects lay their eggs.

    Mosquitoes create grave threats to human health beyond just bites. The World Health Organization (WHO) has described the insects as "one of the deadliest animals in the world," due to their ability to rapidly spread deadly diseases such as dengue fever and malaria. There is currently no effective vaccine or treatment for most mosquito-spread diseases, leaving controlling the insects' populations one of the most effective control methods, according to the International Journal of Science. “A new tool like what's being described in this paper is very much needed” said Stephen Dobson, a professor of medical insectology at University of Kentucky.