It has been several weeks since we tookour daughter to college and she seems to be adjusting  well after a short period of homesickness.For us, though, it's another story. Like most parents, I love checking in on mychildren at night. But now she's gone, and I find nighttimes the hardest. Imiss her most at night.

    In my neighborhood, most of the parentswhose kids are off to college are dealing with similar melancholy. Myhusband is filled with anxiety. One friend talked about getting this sickfeeling in her stomach as she prepared for the college drop-off. We complainedthat many of us were too busy to truly enjoy being with our children while wehad them.

    For us moms, seeing Toy Story 3 onlymade the sadness worse as we watched the character Andy, who is the same age asour kids, say goodbye to his childhood as he prepares to leave for college. Andit's not just “first-time” parents like me. Two moms who have kids already wellinto college said the separation didn't get any easier. “You feel likesomething has been taken away from inside you,” said one of them.

    I imagine things will get easier withtime, especially as I see my daughter adjust to college life. Meanwhile, as Ikeep my cell phone close to me in bed and text my daughter goodnight and sweetdreams every night, I like to think at messages serve as a night light thatkeeps her safe.

    The “babies” tend to be on or near me, or crying, or both. I spend a fair amount of time trying to get William to sleep, to get Elliott to get involved in something that will actually keep him happy for a little while, or to get William to play on the floor for 10 minutes straight so that I can get something done. But, a lot of days, it seems like I'm not succeeding in any of those efforts.

    So, yesterday, a friend of mine posted a picture on Facebook. This particular friend has a baby who is about a month younger than William. The picture was of the baby, who had made his way across the floor to the toys housed along the side of the room. I just kept looking at that picture and thinking that if only William had some different toys to play with, perhaps he would stay occupied a bit longer at a stretch. But William seems so bored with all of his toys! And I am so ready for him to be ready to play. In order to find a way to make him playing longer, I kept looking at that picture. Suddenly, I realized my sons need to play closer to me.

    So I cleared off the cubby(围起来的)shelves in the playroom, and my husband and I moved it to the living room. We found all of the toys that would be safe for William and put them in the cubbies. Then, we pulled the play kitchen in.

    William was so interested in what I was doing that he sat there and played and chewed on his toys while we moved furniture. When we were done, I moved him over closer to the cubbies and he got so excited that he didn't disturb for an hour, while I made dinner and cleaned up! Even Elliott played happily for a few hours. It was a dream come true! And I got to know that my lack of happy children was because of my desire for a toy—free living room.

    This year's flu season is pretty scary. To try to minimize the effects, public officials are still urging anyone who hasn't yet gotten their flu shot to get one as soon as possible. However, even if every single person got a shot in the arm, the vaccine(疫苗)—with its excellent 36 percent effectiveness—would not prevent everyone from getting infected with the annoying virus. Knowledge is power, so here's what goes on in your body when you come down with the flu.

    The influenza virus primarily attacks your nose, throat, and the tubes that lead to your lungs. But the flu is so much more than that. Your muscles ache, your head hurts, and your appetite goes down, among other things. To our surprise, almost all of these symptoms have less to do with the virus itself than with your immune(免疫的)response to them. Unfortunately, the very defense you have in place to get rid of the flu is the reason you feel so painful when you recover.

    The virus usually enters through your mouth, typically by way of your hands. But it takes a few days for symptoms to set in. While this process might cause some harm to your nose and throat, it's nothing major, and nothing like the symptoms that typically accompany a bad or even mild case of the flu.

    The real fun starts when your immune system begins to fight. Your immune system comes in two parts: the innate system and the adaptive. The innate immune system is essentially an all-purpose tool. As soon as your body senses the presence of any injury or invader (入侵者), the innate immune system launches into action by producing tiny proteins called cytokines and chemokines. The cytokines reproduce almost immediately and start to attack the virus. This increase in immune cells creates an serious inflammation(炎症) throughout the body. But the worst is still to come. Meanwhile, the chemokines work with the adaptive immune system to help create T cells. These cells are a special type of white blood cell that works in a much more specific way: They find the influenza virus, identify what's special about it, and create something unique on their surface that finds and destroys similar invaders.

    Each year there is an increasing number of cars on roads and streets as millions of new cars and trucks are produced. One out of every six Americans works at putting together the parts of cars, driving trucks, building roads or filling cars and trucks with gas. Americans won't live without cars!

    Most Americans would find it hard to think what life would look like without cars. However, some have realized the serious problems of the air pollution that is caused by the car.

    The polluted air becomes poisonous and dangerous to health.

    One way to get rid of the polluted air is to build a car that does not pollute. That's what several of the large car factories have been trying to do. But to build a clean car is easier said than done. Progress in this field has been slow.

    Another way is to take the place of the car engine by something else. Inventors are now working on steam cars as well as electric cars. Many makers believe that it will take years to develop a practical model that pleases man.

    To prevent the world from being polluted by cars, we'll have to make some changes in the way many of us live. Americans, for example, have to cut down on the number of their total cars. They are encouraged to travel and go to work by bicycle. Bicycling is thought to help keep the air clean.

    But this change does not come easily. A large number of workers may find themselves without jobs if a car factory closes down. Thus the problem of air pollution would become less important than that of unemployment.

    Although cars have led us to a better life, they have also brought us new problems.

    Scientists in Western Australia claim to have made a new discovery—they have found gold in the leaves and twigs of trees. The researchers believe that the trees suck up the gold from deep underground, over 30 metres down. The discovery has been described as the first of its kind in the world. Australian gold exploration companies are pleased because it will make finding gold cheaper. Rather than drilling deep holes to find gold, they have more ways to examine tree leaves and branches. There is only a tiny amount of gold in the leaves. It would take 500 trees to make one gold ring. The gold is found using a special X-ray machine owned by an Australian government agency. A pure X-ray and a powerful microscope scan the leaves and branches.

    The claim that this is the first time that gold particles (微粒) have been found in living material might not be true, though. Ancient Chinese wisdom understood the connection between plants and the precious stones and minerals underneath them. They used plant life to find minerals and that was thousands of years ago. In the Zhou Dynasty, it was written in a book that a certain plant grew only near deposits of gold. Over the next 2,000 years, Chinese people wrote about different plants and how they grew, showed where minerals and precious stones such as jade, copper, lead, silver and gold were.

    Even more importantly, in the 1, 000s, Su Song described how copper, gold, silver, lead and tin were observed and taken from certain plants. These were amazing scientific discoveries. Meanwhile, this knowledge was unknown in the rest of the world until about 1, 600. This was when a British man realised that oak trees grew larger and greener where there was alum (明矾) in the ground. Maybe ancient Chinese has more knowledge to teach modern scientists.

My acquaintance, who never excelled in scholastic pursuits, possessed an innate acuity for aesthetic appreciation. On one occasion, I was engaged in the task of arranging a collection of floral blooms within a container, yet was unable to achieve a visually pleasing arrangement. She approached and, with a few deft motions of her hand, metamorphosed the ensemble into an arresting arrangement of blossoms. Upon receiving commendation for this remarkable proficiency, she dismissed the praise with a nonchalant gesture, perceiving her imaginative prowess as unremarkable.

Frequently, we tend to undervalue our innate competencies, perhaps because we are conditioned to regard only those attributes such as superior intellectual capacity, a proclivity for numerical computation, or an extensive lexicon as possessing intellectual merit. I was graced with the opportunity to discern a different perspective at an early stage of my life.

Upon my commencement of secondary education, a vocational advisor informed my parent that I was not suited for higher education due to my lackluster performance in a spelling component of a standardized assessment. Fortunately, my parent recognized the breadth of my intellectual endowments and advocated on my behalf, demanding that I be included in an academically rigorous curriculum. This episode fundamentally shaped the trajectory of my existence, illustrating the significance of not succumbing to the categorizations imposed by others and enabling me to reach my fullest intellectual capacity.

In the nascent years of the 1980s, Howard Gardner, an eminent scholar from Harvard, introduced the groundbreaking notion of "multiple intelligences." In his seminal work, "Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences," he posited that intelligence transcends the conventional definition and encompasses a diverse spectrum of cognitive faculties.

What captivates me about the theory of multiple intelligences is its capacity to reconceptualize one's own capabilities and innate skills, particularly those that may not conform to the structured confines of academic paradigms. While it is acknowledged that a threshold of intellectual capability is necessary for success, the analytical competencies gauged by I.Q. assessments do not encompass the complete narrative. Hence, we ought to extol all of our talents and competencies, for they constitute the essence of what renders your individual cognitive capacity so extraordinary and distinctive.