My parents were in a huge argument, and I was really upset about it. I didn't know who I should talk with about how I was feeling. So I asked Mom to allow me to stay the night at my best friend's house. Though I knew I wouldn't tell her about my parents' situation, I was looking forward to getting out of the house. I was in the middle of packing up my things when suddenly the power went out in the neighborhood. Mom came to tell me that I should stay with my grandpa until the power came back on.

    I was really disappointed because I felt that we did not have much to talk about. But I knew he would be frightened alone in the dark. I went to his room and told him that I'd stay with him until the power was restored. He was quite happy and said, “Great opportunity.”

    “What is it?” I asked.

    “To talk, you and I” he said. “To hold a private little meeting about what we're going to do with your mom and dad, and what we're going to do with ourselves now that we're in the situation we are in.”

    “But we can't do anything about it. Grandpa,” I said, surprised that here was someone with whom I could share my feelings and someone who was in the same “boat” as I was.

    And that's how the most unbelievable friendship between my grandfather and me started. Sitting in the dark, we talked about our feelings and fears of life — from how fast things change to how they sometimes don't change fast enough. That night, because the power went out, I found a new friend, with whom I could safely talk about all my fears and pains, whatever they may be. Suddenly, the lights all came back on. “Well,” he said, “I guess that means you'll want to go now. I really like our talk. I hope the power will go out every few nights!”

    Sumeja Tulic had moved from London to New York nine months ago to attend journalism school. Yet her time in New York met with a season of never-ending ugliness in politics and acts of terrorism(恐怖主义) around the world. “One day you laugh, and then you're angry,” said Tulic. As she walked toward the subway station, she thought, “I want to see something nice. Enough of this craziness.”

    At the City Hall station, she saw a man resting against a pillar(柱子), the way anyone might, waiting for the train. The stillness was interrupted(打断) by an announcement that the next train was two stations away. Then Tulic saw the man at the pillar falling forward onto the tracks.

    The man who had fallen was not moving. In what seemed like an instant, three men jumped down to help.

    I don't know where these men got the intelligence and the quickness," Tulic said. "The man who fell was about six feet tall and quite heavy. He was kind of stuck in the tracks. It was terrifying to know that the train was coming. Will it stop? Will they succeed in pulling him out?"

    On the tracks, the unconscious(失去知觉的) man was put into a sitting position by the three men, who then lifted him from below to others who lifted from above and rolled him onto the platform. Then the rescuers were themselves rescued, pulled back to safety by helping hands. As soon as they were all clear, the train pulled in. People getting off the train walked around this unconscious man.

    Two of the men who had jumped onto the platform were holding his hands. “They were saying, ‘You're going to be fine,'” Tulic said. “This was an additional layer of goodness.”

    Doctors arrived, and the man was taken to a local hospital with serious but non-life-threatening injuries.

    “That is the greatest thing,” Tulic said. “The infrastructure(基础) in this city of millions is the people themselves providing, being there for others, without even knowing the person, who he is. It was beautiful to see.”

    You carry a 1.3 kg mass of fatty material in your head that controls everything you will ever do. This fantastic control center lets you think, learn, create, and feel emotions. It also controls everything your body does. What is this amazing machine? It's your brain — a structure so amazing that the famous scientist James Watson called it ＂the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe＂.

    Imagine your kitten jumped onto the kitchen counter, and was about to step onto a hot stove. You would have only seconds to act. In situations like this, your brain reads the signals from your eyes and quickly calculates when, where and at what speed you need to run to save her. Then it tells your muscles to move. No computer can match your brain's great ability to download, process, and react to the flood of information from your eyes, ears and other sensory organs.

    If a bee lands on your foot, sensory neurons(神经元) in your skin send this information to your brain at a speed of more than 240 kilometers per hour. Your brain then uses motor neurons to send a message back to your foot: Shake the bee off quickly! Motor neurons can send this information at more than 320 kilometers per hour!

    Your brain contains about 100 billion tiny cells: neurons — it would take you more than 3,000 years if you tried to count them all. Whenever you dream, laugh, think, see or move, tiny chemical and electrical signals are racing between these neurons along billions of tiny neuron pathways. Believe it or not, the activity in your brain never stops. Countless messages fly around inside it every second, like a super-fast game of table tennis. Your neurons create and send more messages than all the phones in the entire world. And although a single neuron generates only a tiny amount of electricity, all your neurons together can generate enough electricity to power a light bulb.

    Renowned British physicist Stephen Hawking died peacefully at his home in the British university city of Cambridge in March 14 at age 76.

    Hawking, whose 1988 book "A Brief History of Time" became an unlikely worldwide bestseller and cemented (奠定) his superstar status, dedicated his life to unlocking the secrets of the Universe. He held the post of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, which is a position that was once held by Sir Isaac Newton.

    Born in 1942 in Oxford, where his parents spent the final months of pregnancy to avoid the bombings of London, Hawking was said to have been a good student although it wasn't until he was in his 20s that his true potential began to really shine through. Having initially wanted to study Mathematics, Stephen Hawking chose, instead, to read natural sciences with emphasis on Physics.

    Having found University life boring, so much so that he joined the University rowing team to relieve the boredom, it was only following an oral examination that he was awarded a first class degree.

    While at Cambridge, Hawking was diagnosed with a motor neurone (神经元）disease. He was initially given two to three years to live. The illness gradually robbed him of mobility, leaving him confined to a wheelchair, almost completely paralysed and unable to speak except through his trademark voice synthesiser (合成器）.

    Stephen Hawking led an incredible and well documented life. He was referred to in many TV programs, films, and even songs, and appeared as himself in a number of programs including Red Dwarf and the Big Bang Theory. His genius and wit won over fans from far beyond the world of astrophysics (天体物理学）, earning comparisons with Albert Einstein and Sir Isaac Newton.

    Have you ever awakened and felt like you couldn't move? If so, it probably scared you. You may have thought something terrible had happened to you. Actually, many people have this experience on a regular basis. It is called sleep paralysis. Although it sounds scary, it is normal.

    Sleep paralysis happens when a person is falling asleep or waking up. As the person falls asleep, his or her body slowly relaxes. Usually the person's mind relaxes at the same time, but occasionally the mind stays awake longer than the body. As a result, the person can be conscious, or aware, but have trouble moving or speaking. Sleep paralysis can also occur as you wake up. Fortunately, the condition rarely lasts for more than a few seconds. Movement and speech soon return to normal.

    Some people report unusual experiences during sleep paralysis. They may hear, see, or feel things that don't exist. At one time, people thought that ghosts or monsters had entered the room and were holding them down, keeping them from moving. Science has helped us understand that such visions are actually a part of sleep paralysis. Now we know that getting too little sleep, taking certain medications, and changing your sleep schedule can cause sleep paralysis. This condition can be scary if you, but it's just a trick that your mind is playing on your body.

    The problem of robocalls has gotten so bad that many people now refuse to pick up calls from numbers they don't know. By next year, half of the calls we receive will be scams(欺诈). We are finally waking up to the severity of the problem by supporting and developing a group of tools, apps and approaches intended to prevent scammers from getting through. Unfortunately, it's too little, too late. By the time these "solutions" become widely available, scammers will have moved onto cleverer means. In the near future, it's not just going to be the number you see on your screen that will be in doubt. Soon you will also question whether the voice you're hearing is actually real.

    That's because there are a number of powerful voice manipulation (处理) and automation technologies that are about to become widely available for anyone to use. At this year's I/O Conference, a company showed a new voice technology able to produce such a convincing human-sounding voice that it was able to speak to a receptionist and book a reservation without detection.

    These developments are likely to make our current problems with robocalls much worse. The reason that robocalls are a headache has less to do with amount than precision. A decade of data breaches(数据侵入)of personal information has led to a situation where scammers can easily learn your mother's name, and far more. Armed with this knowledge, they're able to carry out individually targeted campaigns to cheat people. This means, for example, that a scammer could call you from what looks to be a familiar number and talk to you using a voice that sounds exactly like your bank teller's, tricking you into "confirming" your address, mother's name, and card number. Scammers follow money, so companies will be the worst hit. A lot of business is still done over the phone, and much of it is based on trust and existing relationships. Voice manipulation technologies may weaken that gradually.

    We need to deal with the insecure nature of our telecom networks. Phone carriers and consumers need to work together to find ways of determining and communicating what is real. That might mean either developing a uniform way to mark videos and images, showing when and who they were made by, or abandoning phone calls altogether and moving towards data-based communications — using apps like FaceTime or WhatsApp, which can be tied to your identity.

    Credibility is hard to earn but easy to lose, and the problem is only going to get harder from here on out.