Jeanne Calment, a French woman, became a record breaker on 17 October of 1995, when at the age of 120 years and 238 days, she became the longest-lived human being on record. A Japanese man died in 1986 at the age of 120 years and 237 days.

    Jeanne Calment lives in a small old people's home in the south of France; her husband, her only child and her grandson have all died. She is nearly blind and deaf and is always in a wheelchair, but her doctor describes her as being more like a 90-year-old in good health than someone of 120. She still has a lively sense of humor. When asked on her 120th birthday what she expected of the future, she replied: A very short one. She also remarked that she thought the good Lord had forgotten all about her.

    So what is the key to a long life? According to some doctors, diet, exercise and no smoking are the three important factors. Jeanne Calment has followed two of the tips. She has always eaten a healthy diet, and she used to do exercise every day until she broke her leg at the age of 115. However, until recently she drank two glasses of strong red wine a day, and she does smoke (now only a little). Besides, Jeanne Calment might have got very good genes from her parents. Her father lived to the age of 94 and her mother to 86.

    A local lawyer bought her house when she was 80 under an agreement that he would pay her some money every year until her death. It must have seemed a good move at the time, but so far the lawyer has paid her at least three times the value of the house. Every year on her birthday Jeanne Calment sends him a card saying: Sorry, I'm still alive!

    Imagine a mass of floating waste is two times the size of the state of Texas. Texas has a land area of more than 678,000 square kilometers. So it might be difficult to imagine anything twice as big. All together, this mass of waste flowing in the North Pacific Ocean is known as the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch（太平洋垃圾带）. It weighs about 3,500,000 tons. The waste includes bags, bottles and containers-plastic products of all kinds.

    The eastern part of the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch is about 1,600 kilometers west of California. The western part is west of the Hawaiian Islands and east of Japan. The area has been described as a kind of oceanic desert, with light winds and slow moving water currents（流，流动）. The water moves so slow that garbage from all over the world collects there.

    In recent years, there have been growing concerns about the floating garbage and its effect on sea creatures and human health. Scientists say thousands of animals get trapped in the floating waste, resulting in death or injury. Even more die from a lack of food or water after swallowing pieces of plastic. The trash can also make animals feel full, diminishing their desire to eat or drink.

    The floating garbage also can have harmful effects on people. There is an increased threat of infection（感染）of disease from polluted waste, and from eating fish that swallowed waste. Divers can also get trapped in the plastic.

    Its existence first gained public attention in 1997. That was when racing boat captain and oceanographer Charles Moore and his crew sailed into the garbage while returning from a racing event. Five years earlier, another oceanographer learnt of the trash after a shipment of rubber duckies got lost at sea. Many of those toys are now part of the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch.

    In August,2017, a team from the University of California, San Diego became the latest group to travel to it. They were shocked by the amount of waste they saw. They gathered hundreds of sea creatures and water samples to measure the garbage patch's effect on ocean environment.

    The human beings seem to be facing a crisis （危机）． After Our best Go players were defeated one by one by the artificial intelligence (AI) AlphaGo, we lost our pride of being at the top of the intelligence chain. And in October，when Saudi Arabia gave citizenship to a robot named Sophia, another privilege of being human was take away．It looks like everything that separates humans and AI is at risk fight now．

    But we keep hoping that instead of “everything ”, there's still something left in us that makes us irreplaceable.

    To Hao Jingfang, winner of the 2016 Hugo Award for Best Novelette, that “something” is our consciousness. “AlphaGo is intelligent in a certain way, but not intelligent enough to ask the important questions – Do I like playing Co? Do I want to play Go today? Why do I have to play Go when you tell me to?” she once said．In other words, computer programs don't have a choice to say “no”． They probably don't even know what a “choice” is – all they ever do is calculate．

    And to He Huaihong，a philosophy (哲学) professor at Peking University，imagination and creativity are also what make us special. A machine couldn't have come up with the theory of gravity just because it was hit by a falling apple，he said．It's human imagination that connects what seem to be completely random and irrelevant concepts，something that a machine—which works by fixed rules only—can't do，at least for now．

    This is why BBC reporter Viktor Mayer-Schonberger suggested that instead of focusing on how computers have overshadowed us on calculating abilities than humans，we should probably “consider our quality at a different end of the spectrum (光谱)：creativity，originality (原创性)，even plain illogical craziness，instead of hard-nosed (顽固的) logic”，he wrote．

    So maybe in the future，as artificial intelligence becomes even more intelligent，humans and A1 will learn to use each other's talents for good．If AI can handle the boring tasks like calculating and driving for us，we'll have more time to create，think，and be busy with “being human”．

    What's small, buzzes here and there and visits flowers? If you said bees or hummingbirds, you got it. You wouldn't be the first if you mixed the two up. Now a group of researchers even say we should embrace our history of considering the two together in the same group. The way scientists study bees could help them study hummingbird behavior, too.

    Scientists first compared the two back in the 1970s when studying how animals search for food. The idea is that animals use a kind of math to make choices in order to minimize the work it takes to earn maximum rewards. Researchers at the time focused on movement rules, like the order in which they visited flowers, and where flowers were located relative to others .It was “almost like an algorithm（算法）”for efficient searching, said David Pritchard, a biologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Hummingbirds and bees had similar solutions.

    As the field of animal cognition（认知）appeared, hummingbird and bee research parted. Neuroscientists and behavioral ecologists developed ways to study bee behavior in naturalistic settings. Hummingbird researchers compared hummingbirds to other birds and borrowed methods from psychology to study their ability to learn in the lab. To be fair, hummingbirds and bees differ. For example, hummingbirds have more advanced eyes and brains than bees. Honeybees and bumblebees are social; hummingbirds typically aren't.

    But however they perceive（感知）or process information, they both experience similar information, Dr. Pritchard said. In day-to-day searching for food, for example, hummingbirds may rely on more of a bee's-eye view than a bird's-eye view. Like other birds, they rely on landmarks, distances and directions to make maps when travelling long distances, but they don't use these cues to find flowers. Move a flower just an inch or so away from where a hummingbird thought it was and it will hover over the flower's original location. Dr. Pritchard is investigating if, like bees, hummingbirds engage in view matching — hovering, scanning snapshots of a place to its memory and using those as references later.

    I recently had dinner with someone who told me that one of his best friends had been killed in a private plane crash, and something happened at the memorial service that he'll never forget. He shared the story with me.

    At the memorial service, his friend's wife walked to the platform to speak to the gathering. She said a friend had asked her the best memory she had of their life together. At the moment, she had been too sad to answer, but she had thought about it since and wanted to answer the question.

    They were in their late forties when he died, and she began talking about a time in their life almost twenty years earlier. She had quit her job to obtain her master's degree, and her husband never hesitated in his support.

    He held down his own job and also did the cooking, cleaning, and other housework while she studied for her degree.

    One time they both stayed up all night. She was finishing her paper, and he was preparing for an important business meeting. That morning, she walked out of her study, leaned against the door by the stairs, looked at her husband downstairs and just thought about how much she loved him. She knew how important this meeting was to his future, and she was feeling guilty that she didn't even have time to make his breakfast. He took his briefcase and hurried out. She heard the garage door open and close, but much to her surprise, she heard it open again about thirty seconds later. From above, she watched her husband dash into the house and walk over to the forgotten coffee table. Marking the surface of it with his finger through the dust with the words "I love you", then he raced back to his car.

    The new widow then looked out at her audience and said, "John and I had a wonderful life together. We have been around the world several times. We've had everything money can buy but nothing comes close to that moment."

    Hearing this, I was deeply moved. "Love makes life worthwhile."

Work and the Young: Generation Jobless

    “YOUNG people ought not to be idle (闲置的) . It is very bad for them," said MargaretThatcher in 1984. She was right: there are few worse things that society can do to its young than to leave them ignored.

    Yet more young people are idle than ever. The International Labour Organization reports that 75m (m=million) young people globally are looking for a job. World Bank surveys suggest that 262m young people are economically inactive. The number of young people without a job is nearly as large as the population of America (311m).

Two factors play a big part. First, the long slowdown in the West has reduced demand for labour, and it is easier to put off hiring young people than it is to fire older workers. Second, inemerging economies population growth is the fastest in countries with disordered labour markets, such as India and Egypt.

    One possible way to settle this problem is to stimulate growth. That is easier said than done in a world suffering from debt, and is anyway a possible answer. The countries where the problem is worst (such as Spain and Egypt) suffered from high youth unemployment even when their economies were growing. Throughout the recession ( 经济不景气)，companies have continued to complain that they cannot find young people with the right skills. This underlines the importance of two other solutions: reforming labour markets and improving education.

    Youth unemployment is often at its worst in countries with inflexible labour markets. High taxes on hiring, strict rules about firing, high minimum wages: all these help force young people to the street corner. South Africa has some of the highest unemployment, in part because it has powerful trade unions and inflexible rules about hiring and firing. Many countries with high youth unemployment rate have high minimum wages and heavy taxes on labour. India has around 200 laws on work and pay.

    Across the OECD (经合组织) , people who left school at the earliest opportunity are twice as likely to be unemployed as university graduates. But it is unwise to conclude that governments should simply continue increasing the number of people who graduate from university. In both Britain and the United States many people with arts degrees are finding it impossible to get appropriate jobs. In North Africa university graduates are twice as likely to be unemployed as non-graduates.

    What matters is not just number of years of education people get, but its content. This means expanding the study of science and technology and closing the gap between the world of education and the world of work-for example by upgrading vocational education and by building closer relations between companies and schools. Germany, which has the second lowest level of youth unemployment in the rich world, owns long-history system of vocational schooling and apprenticeships (学徒制).

    The problem of youth unemployment has been getting worse for several years. But there are at last some reasons for hope. Governments are trying to address the mismatch between education and the labour market. Companies are beginning to take more responsibility for the young. The world has a real chance of introducing an education-and-training revolution worthy of the solution to the problem.