Jiajia, a third grader who was born with anemia, a medical condition in which there are too few red cells in blood, wrote an affecting article that moved many netizens.

    In the article, she shared her biggest wish: to survive so she could take care of her grandparents. Jiajia, 9, currently lives in the city of Suining in Sichuan province. In the article, she writes, "My heart gets heavier each time I see my grandma cry for me. If I ever get to grow up, I will take good care of her."

    Jiajia contracted pneumonia when she was 4 months old. Since then, she has required a blood transfusion every two weeks.

    After her parents' divorce, her grandparents took her in and faced many challenges in the process of raising her. The girl's article was only 235 words long, and it was handed in as a school assignment.

    Nevertheless, Jiajia's words "deeply impressed" her elementary school teacher, who then posted the article online, where it struck a chord with many people.

    Up till now, a fund started by teachers at Jiajia's school has reached more than 30,000 RMB, which will be put toward Jiajia's future blood transfusions.

    Grown-ups are often surprised by how well they remember something they learned as children but have never practiced ever since. A man who has not had a chance to go swimming for years can still swim as well as ever when he gets back in the water. He can get on a bicycle after many years and still ride away. He can play catch and hit a ball as well as his son. A mother who has not thought about the words for years can teach her daughter the poem that begins "Twinkle, twinkle, little star" or remember the story of Cinderella or Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

    One explanation is the law of overlearning, which can be stated as follows: Once we have learned something, additional learning trials increase the length of time we will remember it.

    In childhood we usually continue to practice such skills as swimming, bicycle riding, and playing baseball long after we have learned them. We continue to listen to and remind ourselves of words such as "Twinkle, twinkle, little star" and childhood tales such as Cinderella and Goldilocks. We not only learn but overlearn.

    The multiplication tables(乘法口诀表) are an exception to the general rule that we forget rather quickly the things that we learn in school, because they are another of the things we overlearn in childhood. The law of overlearning explains why cramming (突击学习) for an examination, though it may result in a passing grade, is not a satisfactory way to learn a college course. By cramming, a student may learn the subject well enough to get by on the examination, but he is likely soon to forget almost everything he learned. A little overlearning, on the other hand, is really necessary for one's future development.

    So you want to be a citizen scientist? The National Science Foundation (NSF) has got you covered. NSF supports citizen science across all areas of science, whether your passion is to scan the night sky, or explore your own backyard.

Join a flock of birders

    eBird is an online platform that allows bird-watchers to go online and record their sightings to a database. With more than 100,000 active users, eBird's system is a treasure of information on bird population, distribution and habitat, which users can explore in real time.

Count every drop

    The Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network (CoCoRaHS) is the largest provider of daily precipitation observations in the United States. Volunteers set up rain gauges and record data every time a rain, snow or hail storm passes over. Data is organized and shared on the CoCoRaHS website, and used by scientists, farmers and more.

Search for stars with your computer

    Einstein@Home uses your computer's idle time to search for space signals. The project has already had major successes: Volunteers discovered about 50 stars, using data from Puerto Rico's Arecibo Observatory and Australia's Parkes Observatory. Einstein@Home also searches for gravitational-wave signals using data from NSF's Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory.

Be part of a supercomputer

    To link all those home computers, Einstien@Home uses software called the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, better known as BOINC. The software choreographs(安排，筹划) the technical aspect of volunteer computing and helps you use radio telescope signals to search for alien life.

Join the plankton party

    Without plankton, life in the ocean would not exist. These tiny organisms form the base of the food chain, and play an important role in the global carbon cycle. Plankton Portal enlists citizen scientists to identify images of plankton, snapped by the In Situ Icthyoplankton Imaging System (ISIIS), an underwater robot engineered at the University of Miami. ISIIS has taken millions of images in oceans around the world and upload them into a database; classifying the images helps researchers understand plankton diversity, habitat and behavior.

    “Educational researchers, political scientists and economists are increasingly interested in the characteristics and skills that parents, teachers and schools should foster in children to increase chances of success later in life,” said lead author Marion Spengler, PhD of the University of Tubingen.” Our research found that specific behaviors in high school have long-lasting effects for one's later life.”

    Spengler and her co-authors analyzed data collected by the American Institutes for Research from 346, 660 U. S. high school students in 1960, along with follow-up data from 81,912 of those students 11 years later and 1,952 of them 50 years later. The initial high school phase measured a variety of student behaviors and attitudes as well as personality characteristics, cognitive abilities, parental socioeconomic status and demographic(人口统计的)factors. The follow-up surveys measured overall educational attainment, income and occupational prestige(声望).

    Being a responsible student, showing an interest in school and having fewer problems with reading and writing were all significantly associated with greater educational attainment and finding a more prestigious job both 11 years and 50 years after high school. These factors were also all associated with higher income at the 50-year mark. Most effects remained even when researchers controlled parental socioeconomic status, cognitive aibility and other broad personality characteristics such as conscientiousness.

    While the findings weren't necessarily surprising, Spengler noted how reliably specific behaviors people showed in school were able to predict later success.

    Further analysis of the data suggested that much of the effect could be explained by overall educational achievements, according to Spengler.

    “Student characteristics and behaviors were rewarded in high school and led to higher educational attainment, which in turn was related to greater occupational prestige and income later in life,” she said. “This study highlights the possibility that certain behaviors at crucial periods could have long-term consequences for a person's life.”

    According to Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, reading aloud was a common practice in the ancient world, the Middle Ages, and as late as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Readers were “listeners attentive to a reading voice,” and “the text addressed to the ear as much as to the eye.” The significance of reading aloud continued well into the nineteenth century.

    Using Charles Dickens's nineteenth century as a point of departure, it would be useful to look at the familial and social uses of reading aloud and reflect on the functional change of the practice. Dickens habitually read his work to a domestic audience or friends. In his later years he also read to a broader public crowd Chapters of reading aloud also abound in Dickens's own literary works. More importantly, he took into consideration the Victorian practice when composing his prose, so much so that his writing is meant to be heard, not only read on the page.

    Performing a literary text orally in a Victorian family is well documented. Apart from promoting a pleasant family relationship, reading aloud was also a means of protecting young people from the danger of solitary (孤独的) reading. Reading aloud was a tool for parental guidance. By means of reading aloud, parents could also introduce literature to their children, and as such the practice combined leisure and more serious purposes such as religious cultivation in the youths. Within the family, it was commonplace for the father to read aloud Dickens read to his children: one of his surviving and often-reprinted photographs features him posing on a chair, reading to his two daughters.

    Reading aloud in the nineteenth century was as much a class phenomenon as a family affair, which points to a widespread belief that Victorian readership primarily meant a middle-class readership, Those who fell outside this group tended to be overlooked by Victorian publishers。Despite this, Dickens, with his publishers Chapman and Hall, managed to distribute literary reading materials to people from different social classes by reducing the price of novels. This was also made possible with the technological and mechanical advances in printing and the spread of railway networks at the time.

    Since the literacy level of this section of the population was still low before school attendance was made compulsory in 1870 by the Education Act, a considerable number of people from lower classes would listen to recitals of texts. Dickens's readers, who were from such social backgrounds, might have heard Dickens in this manner. Several biographers of Dickens also draw attention to the fact that it was typical for his texts to be read aloud in Victorian England, and thus illiteracy was not an obstacle for reading Dickens. Reading was no longer a chiefly closeted form of entertainment practiced by the middle class at home.

    A working-class home was in many ways not convenient for reading: there were too many distractions, the lighting was bad, and the home was also often half a workhouse. As a result, the Victorians from the non-middle classes tended to find relaxation outside the home such as in parks and squares, which were ideal places for the public to go while away their limited leisure time. Reading aloud, in particular public reading, to some extent blurred the distinctions between classes. The Victorian middle class defined its identity through differences with other classes. Dickens's popularity among readers from the non-middle classes contributed to the creation of a new class of readers who read through listening.

    Different readers of Dickens were not reading solitarily and “jealously,” to use Walter Benjamin's term. Instead, they often enjoyed a more communal experience, an experience that is generally lacking in today's world. Modem audiobooks can be considered a contemporary version of the practice. However, while the twentieth- and twentieth-first-century trend for individuals to listen to audiobooks keeps some eharacteristics of traditional reading aloud-such as “listeners attentive to a reading voice” and the ear being the focus—it is a far more solitary activity.

    I was in a terrible mood. Two of my friends had gone to the movies the night before and hadn't invited me. I was in my room thinking of ways to make them sorry when my father came in.

    "Want to go for a ride, today, Beck? It's a beautiful day."

    "No! Leave me alone!" Those were the last words I said to him that morning. My friends called and invited me to go to the mall with them a few hours later. I forgot to be mad at them and when I came home to find a note on the table. My mother put it where I would be sure to see it.

    "Dad has had an accident. Please meet us at Highland Park Hospital".

    When I reached the hospital, my mother came out and told me my father's injuries were extensive. "Your father told the driver to leave him alone and just call 911, thank God! If he had moved Daddy, there's no telling what might have happened. A broken rib（肋骨）might have pierced（穿透）a lung..."

    My mother may have said more, but I didn't hear. I didn't hear anything except those terrible words: Leave me alone. My dad said them to save himself from being hurt more. How much had I hurt him when I hurled those words at him earlier in the day?

    It was several days later that he was finally able to have a conversation. I held his hand gently, afraid of hurting him.

    "Daddy… I am so sorry…"

    "It's okay, sweetheart. I'll be okay. "

    "No," I said, "I mean about what I said to you that day. You know, that morning?"

My father could no more tell a lie than he could fly. He looked at me and said. "Sweetheart, I don't remember anything about that day, not before, during or after the accident. But I remember kissing you goodnight the night before. "He managed a weak smile.

    My English teacher once told me that words have immeasurable power. They can hurt or they can heal. And we all have the power to choose our words. I intend to do that very carefully from now on.