This Sunday in London, an American running phenomenon will hit the UK for the first time — and looks set to leave a mark. The Color Run™ series, founded in 2011 by Utah resident Travis Snyder, who currently lives in Los Angeles, is a 5k with a twist: runners start in white clothing, and at each kilometer get caked in brightly colored powders (made from 100% eco-friendly and natural food-grade corn starch) thrown by volunteers.

    Snyder, 35, previously organized rock climbing events but says it was having a child that inspired him to think of an event combining fitness and pleasure. So far,  600,000 people have already taken part in Snyder's fitness festivals across the world, from Sydney to Rio de Janeiro, becoming America's biggest 5k along the way.

    What does Snyder think is its appeal? "I think sometimes people get tired of being so competitive," he says. "In a running event, the person next to you is the tool that you are going to compare yourself to; whether or not you run faster than them or they run faster than you. The Color Run still has running in its basis: people still get to be out and be active. But instead of it being an exclusive experience, it's an inclusive experience, where the people next to you are part of that."

    The events attract a large population, including families and children, along with a higher proportion of women than most runs. For many, it is their first race and furthest distance. Synder's eight-year-old son has taken part in 20 of the races. "It's not a big deal because he doesn't think of it as 5k – he is just running and having fun."

    In line with this theme of participation rather than competition, there are no praises for coming first. If runners want to get a result, they will have to track it themselves, as it is not officially timed. And, needless to say, the finish line is one big party – before the clean up begins.

    Japanese researchers say they have developed a new type of glass that can heal itself from cracks and breaks. Glass made from a low weight polymer (聚合物) called “polyether-thioureas” can heal breaks when pressed together by hand without the need for high heat to melt the material.

    The research, published in Science, by researchers led by Professor Takuzo Aida from the University of Tokyo, promises healable glass that could potentially be used in phone screens and other fragile (易碎的) devices, which they say are an important challenge for sustainable (可持续的) societies.

    While self-healing rubber and plastics have already been developed, the researchers said that the new material was the first hard substance of its kind that can be healed at room temperature. The new polymer glass is “highly robust mechanically yet can readily be repaired by compression (压紧) at broken surfaces”.

The characteristics of the polyether-thioureas glass were discovered by accident by a graduate school student named Yu Yanagisawa, who was preparing the material as a glue. Yanagisawa found that when the surface of the polymer was cut, the edges would adhere to each other, healing to form a strong sheet after being manually compressed for 30 seconds at 21℃. Further experiments found that the healed material regained its original strength after a couple of hours.

    Yanagisawa told NHK that he didn't believe the results at first and repeated his experiments several times to confirm the finding. He said, “I hope the repairable glass becomes a new environment-friendly material that avoids the need to be thrown away if broken.”

    This is not the first time a polymer has been suggested as a healable screen for devices such as smartphones. Researchers at the University of California suggested the use of polymer that could stretch to 50 times its original size and heal breaks within 24 hours.

    Smartphone manufacturers have already used self-healing materials in devices. LG's G Flex 2 shipped in 2016 with a coating on its back was capable of healing minor scratches over time, although failed to completely repair heavier damage.

    According to the research conducted by repair firm iMend, over 21% of UK smartphone users were living with a broken screen, with smashed displays being one of the biggest issues alongside poor battery life.

    Yesterday night, over a dinner with my elder brother's family, a topic of happiness came up. My wife, Marla, a psychologist, was sharing Csikszentmihalyi's concept of “flow” with us. Marla explained that according to the research on flow, people are happiest when they are absorbed in a task that is just challenging enough for them to experience a sense of mastery(熟练).

    A few moments later my brother, Yuri, offered the following opinion: “The first and only, necessary and sufficient factor for happiness is to stop associating happiness with pleasure. The two — happiness and pleasure — have nothing to do with each other.” This morning, with my cup of coffee, I searched through a pile of books on my bedside table and—at the bottom—found a book by Bertrand Russell, I started reading but didn't finish. In it, I found the following thought:

    “The human animal, like others, is adapted to a certain amount of struggle for life, and when by means of great wealth homo sapiens can gratify all his whims (突发奇想) without effort, the mere absence of effort from his life removes an essential ingredient of happiness.”

    The conversation came full circle: people are happiest when they are in a state of flow (Csikszentmihalyi's language )…which is the effortful devotion in a moment…which has nothing to do with pleasure.

    Indeed, as Yuri insisted : happiness–as–pleasure is a myth; the association between happiness and pleasure is nothing but a semantic(语义的) habit; psychologically, the two—happiness and pleasure—are arguably different; and breaking up this association between pleasure and happiness might, in fact, be a powerfully first step in pursuit of happiness.

    As I look back on that exchange, I recall that there was an effort, a struggle to find a common understanding about this seemingly difficult idea—a struggle that made me happy.

    Nowadays, social media like Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter are becoming increasingly popular. People have completely made social media part of their daily lives. As a result, many people have developed an Internet personality.

    The Internet personality I am talking about is the one we shape on our social media sites. We are always posting information about ourselves for other people to know even when it can be completely untrue. Some people even go so far as to spend money in buying flowers or “likes” or buying a very expensive camera for their friends to take photos of them. I find it unbelievable. The time and energy spent on these silly things can only make us want to be accepted by more people.

    Social media are also a modem cause of depression: People see the perfect lives of others and consider their own imperfect lives as bad. Even kids deal with this. They don't realize that the reason why they struggle to love themselves is that they spend all day receiving untrue information.

    I find that many people spend more time and energy in making sure that their online personality is worth accepting than caring for their real presence. So many times I have seen confident and beautiful girls on social media. But in the real world, they are extremely shy. They hardly talk to anyone and spend all their time using the phone.

    Social media have gone so far as to even negatively affect marriages. This is because of the fact that there are now “Instagram husbands”—people whose use is to take perfect photos of their partners throughout the day. They spend a lot of time doing that whether they like it or not. Needless to say, social media likely influence relationships in a negative way.

    I think everyone should not use social media at least for a few months to experience the difference it makes to them. They may find life is very different and much better.

    I was in the Sants Cruz Mountains not long ago, speaking and singing at a women's conference. We were focusing on the theme of loving others in practical ways through our gifts, and something in particular happened during one of the sessions（会议）will remain imprinted in memory.

    A young Syrian woman (Lilith) was invited to the conference at the last minute, and everyone seemed surprised and delighted that she'd actually come. Just a few days earlier, Lilith had fled her country and found refuge with one of the women attending the conference. As an Orthodox Christian in Syria, she and her loved ones had become attacked targets of violent terrorist groups in the country's ongoing civil war.

Lilith had witnessed horrors no one of her young age should ever see. Despite the further danger it presented, she'd decided to leave her home and her family to find safety here in America. Knowing some of her story, and seeing her sitting through the sessions at the retreat（畏缩不前）—head, covered in a scarf, bowed toward the floor—broke my heart.

    Lilith's story touched all of us, including Pam, who was quilt maker. Pam had just finished a beautiful quilt, and had brought it with her. She, along with a few of the leaders, decided to give it to Lilith as a symbol of their comfort and love.

During our last session, Lilith was called forward and prayed over, hugged, and wrapped up in that beautiful quilt. I thought of the many hours Pam undoubtedly spent working on it, and the terrible events that led Lilith to this moment—surrounded by the beauty and love quilt embodied. I wept. When they told her it was for her, she wept.

    I began smoking at 13, with a friend in the evenings when we were out. I never thought of the damage it brought me. But I had a bad cough after a cold, and my teeth weren't as white as my sister's, who never smoked. I no longer played any sports. Since all my friends smoked, I never felt different.

    I met and married my husband Paul when we were 22，both smoking like chimneys (烟囱). I had two children by the time I was 26, and life went on as normal. We smoked around our children, never thinking it would be doing them any harm. They both begged us to stop when they learned about the hazards of smoking. We just rolled our eyes at each other.

    My parents quit smoking, and my aunts quit smoking, but they were older. I had lots of time to quit in my life. Paul's mother died of a heart attack at only 55, after suffering two diseases caused by smoking. And still we smoked.

    At the age of 36, I had a child with a breathing problem. We moved outside to smoke, as she had such trouble breathing, and we didn't want to add to that!

    Then my father died a few years later of cancer throughout his body. Still I smoked, even as he asked me on his deathbed to try to stop. I did mean to, but I thought that I had too many worries to deal with. How would I face them without a smoke? Little did I know then that the smoking was only adding to my inability (无能) to deal with trouble, clouding my whole world in smoke.

    Then Paul had an extremely serious problem in his heart because of a condition caused by smoking. Finally, I decided to quit smoking. I knew I'd suffer greatly too if I kept smoking. Paul decided to join me, of course. He had no choice if he didn't want to die.

    Luckily, we made it. Now I have enough energy, a joy in living, and more confidence than ever before.