On the first day of my new high school, I almost had a nervous breakdown. Everything about the school seemed so difficult. When I got home, my parents said, “You're nervous and that's okay. Everyone is afraid of high school. ”I denied it. I wanted to be strong, so I refused to let anyone know about my fear, even my closest friends.

    On the first day I was late for every class and was constantly lost. The school seemed like a puzzle that I couldn't figure out. Was this how the whole year was going to be？ I didn't think I could rise to this challenge, especially carrying a huge backpack that I could hardly lift. It was so big that I could knock someone out with it！The schoolmates seemed to regard me as a fool, and they were probably right.

    Despite my fears, after the first week I finally had my schedule figured out.

    With the exception of falling up and down the stairs a couple of times and getting laughed at, high school was turning out to be not so bad.  It was actually much better than middle school and much more challenging.

    Since then, I've been elected vice president of my class, which wasn't much of a victory since only three people ran for the four positions.

    It is normal to be scared about a new school. Take a deep breath and relax. High school is something that any student can overcome. Make sure you participate in some out-of-class activities because you'll find it easier to make friends. Try to do your best, even if it isn't straight A's.

    Most important of all, be who you are , whether you're a “fool”, an athlete, or a lower grader. Don't try to pretend to be someone you're not. Now you know the true secrets of high school.

    French writer Frantz Fanon once said: ＂To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.＂ Since the world changes every day, so does our language.

    More than 300 new words and phrases have recently made it into the online Oxford Dictionary, and in one way or another they are all reflections of today's changing world.

    After a year that was politically unstable, it's not hard to understand the fact that people's political views are one of the main drives of our expanding vocabulary. One example is ＂clicktivism＂, a compound of ＂click＂ and ＂activism＂. It refers to ＂armchair activists＂ — people who support a political or social cause, but only show their support from behind a computer or smartphone. And ＂otherize＂ is a verb for ＂other＂ that means to alienate (使疏远)people who are different from ourselves — whether that be different skin color, religious belief or sexuality.

    Lifestyle is also changing our language. For example, ＂fitspiration＂ — a compound of fit and inspiration — refers to a person or thing that encourages one to exercise and stay fit and healthy.

    The phrase ＂climate refugee＂ — someone who is forced to leave their home due to climate change—reflects people's concern for the environment.

 According to Stevenson, social media was the main source for the new expressions. ＂People feel much freer to coin their own words these days,＂ he said.

    But still, not all newly-invented words get the chance to make their way into a mainstream (主流的) dictionary. If you want to create your own hit words, Angus Stevenson, Oxford Dictionaries head of content development, suggests that you should not only make sure that they are expressive (有表现力的) and meaningful, but also have an attractive sound so that people will enjoy saying them out loud.

    Every man wants his son to be somewhat of a clone（克隆）, not in features but in footsteps. As he grows you also age, and your ambitions become more unachievable. You begin to realize that your boy, in your footsteps, could probably achieve what you hoped for. But footsteps can be muddied and they can go off in different directions.

    My son Jody has hated school since day one in kindergarten. Science projects waited until the last moment. Book reports weren't written until the final threat.

    I've been a newspaperman all my adult life. My daughter is a university graduate working toward her master's degree in English. But Jody? When he entered the tenth grade he became a "vo-tech" student (技校学生). They're called "motorheads" by the rest of the student body.

    When a secretary in my office first called him "motorhead", I was shocked. "Hey, he's a good kid," I wanted to say. "And smart, really."

    I learned later that motorheads are, indeed, different. They usually have dirty hands and wear dirty work clothes. And they don't often make school honor rolls (光荣榜).

    But being the parent of a motorhead is itself an experience in education. We who labor in clean shirts in offices don't have the abilities that motorheads have. I began to learn this when I had my car crashed. The cost to repair it was estimated at $800. "Hey, I can fix it," said Jody. I doubted it, but let him go ahead, for I had nothing to lose.

    My son, with other motorheads, fixed the car. They got parts (零件）from a junkyard, and ability from vo-tech classes. The cost was $25 instead of $800.

    Since that first repair job, a broken air-conditioner, a non-functioning washer and a non-toasting toaster have been fixed. Neighbors and co-workers trust their car repairs to him.

    These kids are happiest when doing repairs. They joke and laugh and are living in their own relaxed world. And their minds are bright despite their dirty hands and clothes.

    I have learned a lot from my motorhead: publishers need printers, engineers need mechanics, and architects need builders. Most important, I have learned that fathers don't need clones in footsteps or anywhere else.

    My son may never make the school honor roll. But he made mine.

    Throughout the world, parents talk differently to babies than they do to adults. With their young kids, parents use baby talks, featuring long pauses and a roller coaster of pitch（音高）changes.

    While parents may feel a bit silly using baby talks, they shouldn't in fact. Babies not only prefer listening to them, but they also learn new words more easily from them. By highlighting the structure of speech, such as the differences between the vowels（元音）“a” and “o”, baby talks help babies translate sounds into meaningful units of language.

    Actually, the timbre（音色）plays a role. The timbre of an instrument clearly affects how we experience music, but its role in language is less obvious. Looking into the timbre of baby talks, researchers made some surprising discoveries. In a new study published in Current Biology, researchers reported for the first time that mothers shifted their overall vocal timbre when speaking to their babies, as if they were changing their voice into a different instrument to address these unique little listeners.

    In the Princeton Baby Lab, where researchers study how children learn, they recorded English-speaking mothers while they talked with their 7-to-12-month-old babies and while they spoke to an adult experimenter, and found that adult-directed and baby-directed speech had consistently different timbres.

    Most surprising, in a second sample of non-English-speaking mothers, researchers found that this timbre shift was also highly consistent across nine diverse languages. This suggests these timbre shifts may represent a universal form of communication with babies.

    Being able to identify baby talks across multiple languages could give us rich information about the amount and type of language children hear at preschool across different cultural environments. This could help researchers and educators predict and improve outcomes such as vocabulary and success at school.

    Parents should feel self-conscious about their own baby talks: with them they're helping their baby learn.

    When you think of batteries, you'll likely think about them powering up remote controls, cellphones, flashlights and toys. But some people carry a battery around in their body to power a pacemaker (起搏器). It isn't really pleasant and easy to carry batteries because they need to be replaced so often and they can leak poisonous chemicals. A battery-powered pacemaker may become a thing of the past, thanks to a new technology developed by UCLA researchers: A biological super capacitor (超级电容器) , which is thinner than several hairs.

    Teams of researchers at UCLA and the University of Connecticut published a paper in a journal explaining their new invention. The super capacitor is made from a carbon material, and coated with human-like proteins that act as electrodes (电极). But what makes the device different is that it is powered by an energy harvester that changes body heat and movement in the blood into energy.

    Those traditional pacemakers are six to eight millimeters(毫米) thick. They are much bigger. The new super capacitor, which, due to its lack of battery, is only one micrometer(微米) thick. This "little" feature could benefit the new pacemaker's energy efficiency, researchers stated. Also, unlike other batteries used in medical treatments, the super capacitor can bend and twist in the body without suffering damage.

    Though they've not been widely used in the medical world, super capacitors have the ability to serve as a safer and more efficient medical device than the traditional battery-operated devices, the researchers believe.

    "In order to be effective, battery free pacemakers must have super capacitors that can get, store and transport energy. However, commercial super capacitors are too slow to make them work", said Maher El-Kady, a UCLA researcher and co-author of the study. “Our research focused on the custom-designed super capacitor to capture energy effectively, and finding a way to make it exist together successfully with the human body."

All I needed to do to earn the two dollars was to clean her house for a few hours after school. It was a beautiful house with things that were common in her neighborhood, absent in mine.

Working for her brought me a sense of pride, not only because I could immerse myself in little luxuries like movies and candy, but also because I contributed half of my earnings to my mother, ensuring they were used for necessities. I was not like the children in folktales: burdensome mouths to feed, problems so severe that they were abandoned to the forest. I had a status that doing routine chores in my house did not provide — and it earned me a slow smile and confirmations that I was adult-like, not childlike.

Little by little, I got better at cleaning her house — good enough to be given more to do. After struggling to move the piano, my limbs ached terribly. Despite wanting to decline or voice my discomfort, I feared losing my job and the independence and respect it afforded me. She began to offer me her clothes, for a price. Impressed by these worn things, which looked simply elegant to a little girl who had only two dresses to wear to school, I bought a few.

Still I had trouble summoning up (鼓起) the courage to object to the increasing demands she made. Despite feeling overwhelmed, I hesitated to voice my concerns, knowing my mother would urge me to quit. However, one day while alone in the kitchen with my father, I expressed my disappointment. In any case, he put down his cup of coffee and said, "Whatever the work is, do it well — not for the boss but for yourself. You make the job; it doesn't make you. You are not the work you do; you are the person you are."

I have worked for all sorts of people since then, geniuses and fools, quick-witted and dull, big-hearted and narrow. I've had many kinds of jobs, but since that conversation with my father, I have never considered the level of labor to be the measure of myself, and I have never placed the security of a job above my self-worth and family value.