Are you so sure your mistakes are just mistakes? Or could they be building blocks to a success beyond any you imagined?

    When my friend Dorothy goes home to visit her family each Thanksgiving, her mother serves the traditional “mistake salad”. The dish was born many years ago. Dorothy explains, when mother was using a cookbook to make a salad. In the process, mother accidentally included half the salad ingredients(原料)from a recipe(食谱)on the left side of the open cookbook, and half the ingredients from a different salad recipe on the opposite page. Everyone enjoyed the salad so much that she continue to serve it every year. So it was really not a mistake at all.

    Then there was the fellow named Alfred, who invented dynamite(炸药). When Alfred's brother died, the city newspaper confused the two and printed an abituary(讣告)saying that the dead's most notable act was the creation of bombs. Surprised to consider that his name would forever be connected with destruction, Alfred sought to leave a more positive fame to humanity. So he set a prize for people who contributed to world peace. Now the Nobel Prize, established by Alfred Nobel, is the most respected award in the world.

    Everything is part of something bigger, and mistakes are no exception. In his brilliant book Illusions, Richard Bach explains that every problem comes to you with a gift. If you focus only on what went wrong, you miss the gift. If you are willing to look deeper and ask for the bright, the problem will disappear. You are left only with the learning, and you go forward on your path.

    John is a mechanic, but he lost his job a few months ago. He has good heart, but always feared applying for a new job.

    One day, he gathered up all his strength and decided to attend a job interview. His appointment was at 10 am and it was already 8:30. While waiting for a bus to the office where he was supposed to be interviewed, he saw an elderly man wildly kicking the tyre(轮胎) of his car. Obviously there was something wrong with the car. John immediately went up to lend him a hand. When John finished working on the car, the old man asked him how much he should pay for the service. John said there was no need to pay him; he just helped someone in need, and he had to rush for an interview. Then the old man said, "Well, I could take you to the office for your interview. It's the least I could do. Please. I insist." John agreed.

    Upon arrival, John found a long line of applications waiting to be interviewed. John still had some grease(油脂) on him after the car repair, but he did not have much time to wash it off or have a change of shirt. One by one, the applicants left the interviewer's office with disappointed look on their faces. Finally his name was called. The interviewer was sitting on a large chair facing the office window. Rocking the chair back and forth, he asked, "Do you really need to be interviewed?" John's heart sank. "With the way I look now, how could I possibly pass this interview?" he thought to himself.

    Then the interviewer turned the chair and to John's surprise, it was the old man he helped earlier in the morning. It turned out he was the General Manager of the company.

    "Sorry I had to keep you waiting, but I was pretty sure I made the right decision to have you as part of our workforce before you even stepped into the office. I just know you'd be a trustworthy worker. Congratulations!" John sat down and they shared a cup of well-deserved coffee as he landed himself a new job.

    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 except 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.

    Kaith 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 was consistently negative was parents' help with homework." Robinson suggested that may be because parents themselves struggle to understand the task." They may either not remember the material their kids are studying now, or in some cases never learnt 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."

    Raccoons are smaller relatives of bears. They are native to North America, but they can also be found in Asia and Europe. Raccoons live in wooded areas close to water, but they can be often found near urban areas. There are about 7 different species of raccoons. Pygmy raccoon is the only endangered species.

    Raccoons usually reach 40 to 70cm in length and weigh between 5­26kg. Raccoons that live in colder climates are larger and heavier. They have grayish fur, black masks around eyes and long tails covered with black and brown bands. Because of their tails, they are also called "ringtail".

    Raccoons are omnivores. They like to eat insects, eggs, small mammals, fruit, berries, garbage, and so on. Raccoon's hands look like human's. They each have five fingers and are used to collect food, open shells, door or trash cans. Raccoons often place food in water before they start to eat it. They have highly sensitive sense of touch and water increases their sensitivity even more. By touching the food, they get better insight about things they will eat.

    They are easily adaptable (适应的) to various environments. They can live in hollow (中空的) trees equally happily like they can in useless cars. Raccoons live on their own and hunt at night. They don't hibernate (冬眠), but they spend the coldest days of winters in their holes.

    Mating (交配) season takes place from January to mid March. Two months later, female will give birth to 3­4 babies. Their tails don't have bands, and the mask around eyes is still missing. Mother is very protective and she will teach them how to survive and what to eat as they become­ready to leave the hole. Raccoons usually can live only 1.8 to 3.1 years in the wild, but they can live up to 20 years at a zoo.

    Raccoons can pass rabies, a kind of disease, to home­raised animals and people, which is very dangerous. What's more, their waste often has roundworms.

    A young woman turns around and around quickly, and jumps high. In the background, a young girl reads a rejection (拒绝) letter from a ballet school. "You have the wrong body for ballet," it says, "and at thirteen, you are too old." This was one of the most popular advertisements (广告) of 2014 and it describes American ballet Theatre's principal (主要的) dancer Misty Copeland.

    This was not a real letter. But Copeland says it is very similar to letters from her childhood. While many dancers start at the age of three. Copeland only began to study ballet in 1995 as a thirteen-year-old.

    People often told her that she was too old, or that she didn't have the perfect body type (She is only 157 cm tall). Her family moved a lot, and it was sometimes difficult for her to attend ballet classes. But Copeland loved dancing and did not want to give up. She stayed with her ballet teacher during the week and spent time with her family only at the weekend. This was a difficult life, but she worked hard and won her first national competition when she was fourteen years old. Copeland joined the American Ballet Theatre in 2000 and performed in many ballets over the next few years. In 2007, she became a solo (单独的) performer, and in 2015 she became its principal dancer.

    Copeland is now a dancer, author and Broadway performer. She also stars in the 2015 film A Ballerina's Tale. So what's next? According to Copeland, anything is possible: "My career (职业) really is just now beginning."

People have long watched moths （飞蛾） and other flying insects flock to streetlamps, lights and flames. These insects appear attracted by the light. But a new study suggests they may just lose track of which way is up.

Previous theories say light probably blinds flying insects so that they get trapped by the light, or maybe they interpret light at night as a place to fly for a quick escape. Now the new study suggests flying insects instead turn their backs to the sky's light to keep their feet pointing toward the ground. Insects naturally turn their backs toward light. But when that light is from an artificial source, it may affect their sense of direction, leading to them flying in circles or diving toward the ground.

At a field station in Costa Rica, Samuel Fabian, an entomologist from Imperial College London in England and his teammates set up hanging and standing lights, and then used high-speed cameras to track wild, flying insects including moths and flies. Some circled the lights endlessly, and others flew sharply upward, losing speed until they couldn't fly any higher. When the light source pointed up, some insects turned around and headed for the ground. During the flight, the insects always kept the lights at their back even if they'd end up crashing. Crash landings were common when the team lit up a white sheet on the floor. But not when a white sheet—stretched into a height above the floor—was bathed in diffuse （漫射） light, much as the sky would be, insects flew through the area without getting trapped by the light.

The team also observed some species in a lab. Moths and dragonflies generally behaved like the wild insects, and they kept the light at their backs. However, in the lab, fruit flies, like oleander hawk moths—which can fly in the dark—could fly over LED lights without being thrown off course. In the wild, though, the moths still crashed. Maybe this is because, Fabian says, the insects can sometimes control their response to light, or over time, they might learn to avoid artificial light.