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 where schools expect 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.

    Keith 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 their parents' help with homework." Robinson suggested that may be because parents themselves struggle to understand the tasks."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."

Venom(毒液）from a local scorpion(蝎子）in Cuba is being used by Cuban scientists as an effective weapon to fight cancer. The venom, with stopping pain, anti-inflammatory (炎症） and anti-cancer properties, is the active ingredient in the medicine “Vidatox 30 CH“ which can be used to treat liver, brain, lung and other cancers. The treatment has been successfully used for more than four years in humans after being first tested in biological models. Labiofam, a Cuban laboratory, has breeding(繁殖)centers for both the Red Scorpion and Blue Scorpion. Each month, some 30,000 scorpions in Las Minas town, 270 km east of Havana are made to give the venom. After two years, the scorpions are released back into their natural habitat.

Denyer Sanchez, a biologist from Labiofam, explained that the conditions are adjusted for reproduction, proved by the high number of breeding female scorpions. He said when the offspring(后代）becomes able to live in the environment, we release them because they do not have the necessary size yet to remove their venom, said Sanchez. Sanchez also said that there is still much to research on the exploitation process of scorpions, such as female death rate or the ability to survive of the released scorpions.

Cuban research on the scorpion's venom began at the end of 1980s in Guantanamo province, the island's eastern tip, where a group of biologists and doctors became interested in the stories told by the peasants about the venom's benefits. However，the first discovery was made by Cuban biologist Misael Bordier. In 2001, Bordier visited Mexico's National Autonomous University (UNAM) and presented the research progress in a professional journal. Bordier died in 2005, one year before Cuba's Industrial Property Office gave Labiofam the rights to exploit the patent related to the venom.

    The town of Green Bank, West Virginia, is the site of the largest radio telescope in the world, so Internet connections and anything else that can create electromagnetic(电磁的) waves, such as smart phones and microwave ovens, are banned.

    Green Bank is frozen in time, somewhere in the 1950s, because there's a 33,000-square-kilometer zone of silence due to the telescope. Cell phone towers are forbidden.

    The closer you get to the telescope, the greater the restrictions. There's a 16-kilometer radius(半径) around the observatory where radio-controlled items, even toys, cannot be used.

    Telescope employees even work in a special room that blocks electromagnetic waves from leaving it. “Here imagine a submarine(潜艇), water cannot get inside, and so this room is an electric submarine. No electromagnetic waves can get into this room, just as you can't go beyond it,” Michael Holstein, an observatory officer, said.

    The size of a football field, the telescope is so sensitive that it could pick up signals sent from an alien world. And scientists can't wait for that to happen.

    “All the signals that we now receive with the help of telescopes are signals that come from cosmic objects — stars, galaxies. We have not yet received anything from intelligent civilizations,” scientist Richard Lynch said.

    Local people respect the work of the scientists. “Yes, we are different. Many would say that we live the old-fashioned way, in the past. But for us, it's just the way of life that we have always lived,” Sherry said.

    “When we want to meet friends, we just call each other on a wire phone. And instead of sitting in front of your screen, we talk, we go fishing, to the mountains,” resident Sherry said.

    For the latest news, residents read the weekly local newspaper. When she's looking for a phone number, Sherry reaches for the phone book.

    And instead of Facebook, Sherry enjoys daily conversations with her customers. In this town, everyone knows each other and communication is face to face.

    Norman Garmezy, a development psychologist at the University of Minnesota, met thousands of children in his four decades of research. A nine-year-old boy in particular stuck with him. He has an alcoholic mother and an absent father. But each day he would walk in to school with a smile on his face. He wanted to make sure that "no one would feel pity for him and no one would know his mother's incompetence." The boy exhibited a quality Garmezy identified as "resilience".

    Resilience presents a challenge for psychologists. People who are lucky enough to never experience any sort of adversity (逆境) won't know how resilient they are. It's only when they're faced with obstacles, stress, and other environmental threats that resilience, or the lack of it, comes out. Some give in and some conquer.

    Garmezy's work opened the door to the study of the elements that could enable an individual's success despite the challenges they faced. His research indicated that some elements had to do with luck, but quite large set of elements was psychological, and had to do with how the children responded to the environment. The resilient children had what psychologists call an "internal lens of control(内控点)". They believed that they, and not their circumstances, affected their achievements. The resilient children saw themselves as the arrangers of their own fates.

    Ceorge Bonanno has been studying resilience for years at Columbia University's Teachers College. He found that some people are far better than others at dealing with adversity. This difference might come from perception(认知) whether they think of an event as traumatic(创伤), or as an opportunity to learn and grow. "Stressful" or "traumatic" events themselves don't have much predictive power when it comes to life outcomes. "Exposure to potentially traumatic events does not predict later functioning," Bonanno said. "It's only predictive if there's a negative response." In other words, living through adversity doesn't guarantee that you'll suffer going forward.

The good news is that positive perception can be taught. "We can make ourselves more or less easily hurt by how we think about things," Bonanno said. In research at Columbia, the neuroscientist Kevin Ochsner has shown that teaching people to think of adversity in different ways--to reframe it in positive terms when the initial response is negative, or in a less emotional way when the initial response is emotionally "hot"—changes how they experience and react to the adversity.

    The fridge is considered necessary. It has been so since the 1960s when packaged food list appeared with the label: "Store in the refrigerator."

    In my fridge less Fifties childhood, I was fed well and healthy. The milkman came every day, the grocer, the butcher, the baker, and the ice-cream man delivered two or three times each w eek. The Sunday meat would last until Wednesday and the bread and milk left became all kinds of cakes. Nothing was wasted, and w e w ere never troubled by rotten food. Thirty years on, food deliveries have stopped, and fresh vegetables are almost impossible to get in the country.

    The invention of the fridge contributed comparatively little to the art of food preservation. Many well-tried techniques already existed — natural cooling, drying, smoking, salting, sugaring, bottling...

    What refrigeration did promote was marketing — marketing hardware and electricity, marketing soft drinks, marketing dead bodies of animals around the world in search of a good price.

    Consequently, most of the world's fridges are to be found, not in the tropics where they might prove useful, but in the rich countries with mild temperatures where they are climatically almost unnecessary. Every winter, millions of fridges hum (make a low continuous sound) away continuously, and at vast expense, busily maintaining an artificially-cooled space inside an artificially-heated house —while outside, nature provides the desired temperature free of charge.

    The fridge's effect upon the environment has been clear, while its contribution to human happiness has been unimportant. If you don't believe me, try it yourself, invest in a food cupboard and turn off your fridge next winter. You may miss the hamburgers, but at least you'll get rid of that terrible hum.

    It's holiday season and time for shopping. There are a bunch of items on your shopping lists ranging from small gifts, toys and festive decorations to Christmas and New Year cards. What's your first reaction to products labeled "Made in China"? If you still tend to relate "Made in China" to poor quality, you need to update your ideas. China's ability to produce high-quality products has been recognized by a growing number of foreigners. It's a misunderstanding to associate low quality with "Made in China".

    Cameron Purdy, a Web user, says that China manufactures poor-quality products does not mean it cannot manufacture high-quality products. He explains that the poor-quality products one purchases in the US for example, are made in the quality that the American companies ask for. "The price that you pay for the product has no relationship to the cost of its manufacturing," suggested Purdy. For example, for an item priced at $20 in the US, the cost of manufacturing it paid by the American company is usually less than $1. To guarantee the room for profit, the Chinese co-manufacturer spends less than $1 to produce the item.

    Amanda Wu, who lives in Shanghai, noted that many top brands have manufacturing factories located in China, and the most convincing example of China's manufacturing quality is Apple products. On the back of the iPhone, one can find the product is Made in China—"Designed by Apple in California. Assembled (装备) in China. "Chinese and foreign Web users commented that some Chinese products with good reputations around the world are Haier, Lenovo, GREE, Huawei and China Railway High-speed.

    On the other hand, foreign misunderstandings can sometimes affect Chinese people's minds. For instance, when Chinese people travel abroad, some would still avoid buying products Made in China. It's time for the world to stop relating Made in China with low-quality products. Just remember, you get what you pay for.