A cat is recovering in California after surviving a 6,500-mile journey across the Pacific stowed inside a Chinese shipping container without food or water. Staff and volunteers have named it “Ni Hao”, which is Chinese for “hello”.

    It was discovered breathing shallowly after a two-week trip across the Pacific Ocean. The cat was seriously suffering from loss of water and starvation when the container was opened in California last week, but was said to be doing well after being sent to the Carson Animal Care Centre in Los Angeles. At first it was too weak to stand, but finally took its first steps. Then it ate a good meal and slept soundly. The cat woke up on Thursday morning, physically in a better condition than 24 hours ago.

     “Ni Hao greeted the medical team with its first meow this morning and is attempting to stand,” said Marcia Mayeda, head of the Los Angeles Department of Animal Care and Control. Aaron Reyes, director of the Department, added, “We finally got to hear its voice. It sounds like a single-engine plane.”

    Ni Hao is expected to be observed for 60 days but afterwards animal workers will look forward to providing it with a good shelter. “It's much better for it to recover in a home environment,” Mr. Reyes said. “It's just like a human being in a hospital so we're hoping to move it.” He added, “Little by little we're getting there. We're hoping that under the treatment and with rest, it'll be able to recover quickly.”

    It was not immediately clear how the cat got into the container.

    As countless unmade beds and unfinished homework assignments prove, kids need rules. Yet how parents make demands can powerfully influence a child's social skills, psychologists at the University of Virginia recently found after the conclusion of a study investigating the transition from adolescence to adulthood.

    Initially 184 13-year-olds filled out multiple surveys, including one to assess how often their parents employed psychologically controlling strategies, such as inducing guilt or threatening to withdraw affection. The kids rated, for example, how typical it would be for Dad to suggest that “if I really cared for him, I would not do things that caused him to worry”or for Mom to become “less friendly when I did not see things her way.”

    The researchers followed up with the subjects at ages 18 and 21, asking the young adults to bring along a close friend and, later, a romantic partner if they had one. These pairs were asked to answer hypothetical (假设的) questions that were purposefully written to inspire a difference of opinion. “We wanted to see whether they could navigate a disagreement in a healthy way, ”says study leader Barbara Oudekerk, now at the U. S. Department of Justice's bureau of statistics.

    In the October issue of Child Development, Oudekerk and her colleagues report that the 13-year-olds who had highly controlling parents struggled in friendly disagreements at age 18. They had difficulty stating their opinions in a confident, reasoned manner in comparison to the kids without controlling parents. And when they did speak up, they often failed to express themselves in warm and productive ways.

    The researchers suspect that pushy parents ruin their child's ability to learn how to argue his or her own viewpoint in other relationships. Although parents do need to set boundaries, domineering strategies imply that any disagreement will damage the bond itself. Separate findings suggest that parents who explain the reasons behind their rules and turn disagreements into conversations leave youngsters better prepared for future arguments.

    The consequences of tense or domineering relationships appear to get worse with time. This study also found that social difficulties at 18 predicted even poorer communication abilities at age 21. Psychologist Shmuel Shulman of Bar-Ilan University in Israel, who did not participate in the work, thinks these conclusions convincingly reveal how relationship patterns “carry forward” into new friendships.

    Have you ever noticed how Americans fill up their entire glass with ice and then pour their beverage(饮品) in, but Europeans take their drinks at room temperature? In the U. S., we've created fridges that give you cold ice at the press of a button, but in Britain they typically serve their tap water warm.

    This tradition—if that's what you want to call it-dates back to the 19th century. During that time, it was already commonplace for most American homes to have an ice box. Ice would be harvested in northern America or Canada and shipped across the Atlantic and sold at a high price in British department stores. Can you imagine heading to Macy's to treat yourself to a block of ice?

    Putting ice in your drink started to become somewhat of a fashion(时尚) trend for the wealthy in Britain. Some would put a few cubes in their champagne and sip on their chilled drinks at high-class parties. But, like with any fashion trend, it eventually faded, mainly because the ice was just too expensive. And even once ice boxes began appearing in homes in Britain as well, Brits never took a liking to ice in their drinks.

    So, next time you travel overseas, don't feel offended(冒犯) when your server gives you an eye roll when you ask for ice water.

It is OK not to be OK

    This is the simple encouragement people often use for themselves or others. But for professional athletes, this can be the hardest sentence to say.

    On March 6, Cleveland Cavaliers forward Kevin Love posted an article titled “Everyone is Going Through Something” on the website The Players' Tribune. In the article, the 29-year-old showed how he suffered from his first panic attack on Nov 5 in a game against the Atlanta Hawks and why he was so worried about sharing his story with the public.

    Love identified that what keeps people from speaking up about their mental health challenges is the fear that many people see them as a weakness. “Growing up, you figure out really quickly how a boy is supposed to act. You learn what it takes to 'be a man'. It's like a play book: Be strong. Don't talk about your feelings. Get through it on your own,” he wrote.

    And being an NBA player made his situation even more difficult. Love was afraid to share his struggles because he didn't want his Cavaliers teammates to think that he was unreliable.

    However, as it turned out, Love's teammates understood and supported him. Cleveland superstar LeBron James even wrote on social media that Love is “even more powerful now than ever before”.

    For Love, it was a journey of empowerment to accept and address his mental illness and share his experience with millions of people who face the same problems. In fact, he was inspired to talk about his situation by Toronto Raptors shooting guard DeMar DeRozan, who had also opened up about his mental health issues.

    Last month, the 28-year-old told the Toronto Sun that despite being a top-performing and wealthy NBA player, he still deals with constant blues. “It's one of the things that no matter how indestructible (坚不可摧的) we look like we are, we're all human at the end of the day, ”he said. “Sometimes…it gets the best of you, when everything in the whole world's on top of you, ” But other times, by admitting who we are, we can get what we want. As Love told Advance Ohio Media, “You have to let some of that stuff bleed out in order to fully recover from it.”

    A biologist once criticized for stealing eggs from the nests of the rarest bird in the world has been awarded the "Nobel Prize" of conservation after his methods saved nine species from extinction.

Professor Carl Jones won the 2016 Indianapolis Prize — the highest accolade in the field of animal conservation — for his 40 years of work in Mauritius, where he saved an endangered kestrel from becoming the next Great Auk.

    When the 61-year-old first travelled to the east African island in the 1970s, he was told to close down a project to save the Mauritius kestrel. At the time there were just four left in the wild, making it the rarest bird on Earth. However, he stayed, using the techniques of captive breeding (人工繁殖), which involved snatching eggs from the birds' nests and hatching(孵化)them under incubators, prompting the mothers to lay another set of eggs in the wild.

    A decade later, the number of Mauritius kestrels had soared to over 300 and today there are around 400 in the wild. The biologist has also been necessary in efforts to bring other rare species back from the edge of extinction, including the pink pigeon, echo parakeet and Rodrigues warbler.

    Prof Jones was awarded the $250,000 (£172,000) prize at a ceremony in London.

"As a young man in my 20s, I certainly didn't enjoy the stress and the tension of the criticism I received," reflecting on the start of his career, he said the Maurutius kestrel project had been seen as a "dead loss" at the time. In the 1970s there was fierce opposition to the captive breeding techniques, with critics arguing that they were too risky and took the emphasis off breeding in the wild.

    Prof Jones has devoted his whole life to his work, only becoming a father for the first time eight years ago, at 53. He said receiving the prize was particularly important to him, because it proved that his work to save birds was right.

This winter, the U. S. state of California received unusually large amounts of rain and snow. Now, people worry that some areas will flood as the snow in the Sierra Nevada Mountains melts (融化).

Ron Caetano lives about half-way between the cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco. He is preparing to leave in case his community, called the Island District, floods.

More than 100 years ago, the Island District area was under a large lake named Tulare Lake. At one time, Tulare Lake was the largest freshwater lake west of the Mississippi River. But reservoirs (水库) and watering systems for agriculture caused it to disappear. However, in very rainy years, farmland can still get covered with water.

Experts say reservoirs near the area will likely receive three times more water than they can hold this year. That means officials must increase the amount of water they release (释放) from the reservoirs. If too much water is released, the area might flood.

The Island District has organized a community network to help prepare for floods. People are placing sandbags close to elderly neighbors' houses to block possible flooding. And they are looking at reports from water officials, county officials, and from each other.

California has had very dry weather in recent years. Both cities and farm communities acclaimed this year's winter rains. If the weather gets warmer slowly, the snow will not melt quickly and there may be little or no flooding. But if the weather gets hot quickly, that will bring trouble from too much melting snow.

Officials announced plans to close parts of Yosemite National Park because of threats of flooding. The park is about 270 kilometers east of San Francisco in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

Nicholas Pinter is with the University of California, Davis Center for Watershed Sciences. He said the lake's size has always changed because of California's weather. He described the surrounding area this way. "It has been an engineering problem all along," he said. "This is a bathtub (浴缸) with no way out."