Watson entered Mr. Smith's office. The boss was a hard man. He fired people who didn't do well without giving them a second chance.

    “Watson,” said Mr. Smith, “this past year your department hasn't earned money. We're going to drop that department. It's finished. I'm sorry, —but you'll have to go.” “But, sir — if I just had a little more time. For the moment I need the job to keep my son at Riverside School.”

    “What's that!” said the boss. “Riverside! I didn't know you had a boy there. That's an expensive school for a man with your salary.”

    “I know, sir. But he likes it there so much! He's a star athlete and the best boxer in the school. The boys call him Champ there.”

    The boss sat perfectly still for a long time — a faraway (恍惚的) look in his eyes. Then, suddenly, he said, “We've got to close your department, Watson. But you'll take over a new job in another department. It means longer hours—maybe more pay. Now get out. You're here for life.”

    Watson got out, with surprise on his face. Then the boss took a letter from the top drawer of his desk. It was Herbie's last letter from Riverside School —written a few days before he died. He had read it over and over again with sick pain. The letter read:

    I can't say the boys here are any nicer to me than the others were. I guess it's the same everywhere when you're a cripple (跛脚的人). But don't worry about me, Dad, They've got a good chemistry department here. And there's one boy here who is really great. He's a track star and boxing champ (冠军) and just tops in chemistry.

    The boys call him Champ. He made them stop throwing my books around. And he knocked a boy down who hit me. He is the best friend I ever had. Dad, when I grow up, I want to do something for Champ. Something big — that he won't even know about.

Your son,

Herbie

    I tried not to be biased, but I had my doubts about hiring Stevie. His social worker assured me that he would be a good, reliable busboy. But I had never had a mentally handicapped employee. He was short, a little fat, with the smooth facial features and thick-togued speech of Down's Syndrome（唐氏综合症）. I thought most of my customers would be uncomfortable around Stevie, so I closely watched him for the first few weeks.

    I shouldn't have worried. After the first week, Stevie had my staff wrapped around his stubby little finger, and within a month my regular trucker customers had adopted him as their official truck stop mascot. After that, I really didn't care what the rest of the customers thought of him. He was like a 21-year-old in blue jeans and Nikes, eager to laugh and eager to please, but fierce in his attention to his duties. Every salt and pepper shaker was exactly in its place, not a bread crumb or coffee spill was visible when Stevie got done with the table. Our only problem was persuading him to wait to clean a table until after the customers were finished.

    Over time, we learned that he lived with his mother, a widow who was disabled. Money was tight, and what I paid him was probably the difference between them being able to live together and Stevie being sent to a group home.

    That's why the restaurant was a gloomy place that morning last August, the first morning in three years that Stevie missed work. He was at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester getting a heart surgery. His social worker said that people with Downs Syndrome often had heart problems at an early age and there was a good chance he would come through the surgery in good shape and be back at work in a few months.

    A ripple of excitement ran through the staff later that morning when word came that he was out of surgery, in recovery, and doing fine. Frannie, my head waitress, did a little dance when she heard the good news. Belle Ringer, one of our regular trucker customers, stared at her and asked, “Okay, Frannie, what was that all about?”

    "We just got word that Stevie is out of surgery and going to be okay."

    "I was wondering where he was. I had a new joke to tell him. What was the surgery about?"

    Frannie quickly told Belle Ringer and the other two drivers sitting at his booth about Stevie's surgery, then sighed: "Yeah, I"m glad he is going to be OK," she said. "But I don't know how he and his Mom are going to handle all the bills. From what I hear, they"re barely getting by as it is."

    Belle Ringer nodded thoughtfully, and Frannie hurried off to wait on the rest of her tables.

    After the morning rush, Frannie walked into my office. She had a couple of paper napkins in her hand.

    "What's up?" I asked.

    "I cleared off that table where Belle Ringer and his friends were sitting after they left, and I found this. This was folded and tucked under a coffee cup."

    She handed the napkin to me, and three $20 bills fell onto my desk when I opened it. On the outside, in big, bold letters, was printed "something For Stevie".

    That was three months ago. Today is New Year's day, the first day Stevie is supposed to be back to work. His placement worker said he had been counting the days until the doctor said he could work, I arranged to have his mother bring him to work, met them in the parking lot and invited them both to celebrate his day back. I took him and his mother by their arms. "To celebrate you coming back, breakfast for you and your mother is on me.”

    I led them toward a large corner booth. I could feel and hear truck customers and the rest of the staff following behind as we marched through the dining room. We stopped in front of the big table. Its surface was covered with coffee cups and dinner plates, all sitting slightly on dozens of folded paper napkins.

    "First thing you have to do, Stevie, is clean up this mess," I said.

    Stevie looked at me, and then pulled out one of the napkins. It had 'something for Stevie" printed on the outside. As he picked it up, two $10 bills fell onto the table. Stevie stared at the money, then at all the napkins peeking from beneath the tableware, each with his name printed on it.

    I turned to his mother. "There's more than $10,000 in cash and checks on that table, all from truckers and trucking companies that heard about your problems. Happy Thanksgiving!"

    While everybody else was busy shaking hands and hugging each other, Stevie, with a big, big smile on his face, was busy clearing all the cups and dishes from the table.

This year's flu season is pretty scary. To try to minimize the effects, public officials are still urging anyone who hasn't yet gotten their flu shot to get one as soon as possible. However, even if every single person got a shot in the arm, the vaccine(疫苗)— with its excellent 36 percent effectiveness—would not prevent everyone from getting infected with the annoying virus. Knowledge is power, so here's what goes on in your body when you come down with the flu.

    The influenza virus primarily attacks your nose, throat, and the tubes that lead to your lungs. But the flu is so much more than that. Your muscles ache, your head hurts, and your appetite goes down, among other things. To our surprise, almost all of these symptoms have less to do with the virus itself than with your immune(免疫的)response to them. Unfortunately, the very defense you have in place to ge rid of the flu is the reason you feel so painful when you recover.

    The virus usually enters through your mouth, typically by way of your hands. But it takes a few days for symptoms to set in. While this process might cause some harm to your nose and throat, it's nothing major, and nothing like the symptoms that typically accompany a bad or even mild case of the flu.

    The real fun starts when your immune system begins to fight. Your immune system comes in two parts: the innate system and the adaptive. The innate immune system is essentially an all-purpose tool. As soon as your body senses the presence of any injury or invader (入侵者), the innate immune system launches into action by producing tiny proteins called cytokines and chemokines. The cytokines reproduce almost immediately and start to attack the virus. This increase in immune cells creates an serious inflammation(炎症) throughout the body. But the worst is still to come. Meanwhile, the chemokines work with the adaptive immune system to help create T cells. These cells are a special type of white blood cell that works in a much more specific way: They find the influenza virus, identify what's special about it, and create something unique on their surface that finds and destroys similar invaders.

    A new library in Tianjin—Tianjin Binhai Public Library—recently became an online hit. The Daily Mail described it as “breathtaking”. One look at the library and you'll see why. With its very futuristic design and walls loaded with books, it's the dream library of every book lover.

    But there's a burning question lying in the back of our minds: with physical bookstores closing down one by one, what makes libraries survive the wave of digitalization? Do we really still need libraries as we've got the internet in our hands?

    Reporter Ian Clark has the answer. “Libraries are not declining in importance. People are simply changing the way they use them,” he wrote on the Guardian website. Since not everyone can afford a smartphone, a tablet or an internet connection, and not everyone knows how to search the Internet correctly and efficiently, it's public libraries that make sure that these resources are available to a larger group of people.

    And one of the pitfalls that come with online materials is that they're not always reliable. “Google doesn't tell you what you're not getting, so people need to evaluate (评估) the quality of what they see on their screens,” Sarah Pritchard, dean of libraries at Northwestern University, told Northwestern Research Magazine. And libraries are usually where that “evaluation” happens.

    But we still need the physical space that a library provides. It's something that's called a “third place”, according to the Seattle Times. This is a place in which we can fully concentrate on our study and work without easily getting distracted. Compared to other “third places” like coffee shops, libraries have a “non-commercial nature” that allows you to relax completely.

    “Nobody is trying to sell you anything in the library. There is no pressure to buy and there is no judgment of your choices,” Anne Goulding, a professor at Victoria University in New Zealand, wrote on the Newsroom website.

    Babies' main food is rice cereal. But it is often poisoned. Studies have found that many brands contain measurable amounts of inorganic arsenic(无机砷),the most poisonous kind. It's not just nice: an August 2018 study tested 50 foods made for babies, including organic and nonorganic brands such as Gerber, Earths Best, and other popular labels, and found evidence of at least one dangerous heavy metal in every product. Fifteen of the 50 contained enough contaminants(污染物)to pose potential health risks to a child eating one serving or less a day.

    Heavy metals can damage cognitive(认知的)development in children, who are especially at risk because of their smaller size. Inorganic arsenic in drinking water has been found to lower the IQ scores of children by five to six ills. And as heavy metals accumulate in the body over time, they can raise the risk of cancer, diabetes and other physical conditions. Of course, finding you're your favorite brand is contaminated is not a reason to panic. Low levels of exposure for short periods are unlikely to cause serious effects, but parents should focus on reducing the overall levels of these poisonous substances in their children's total diet to limit harm.

    Heavy metals occur naturally on Earth and are present in soil and water. But pesticides(杀虫剂), mining and pollution increase their concentrations, and farming and food manufacturing processes can contribute even more.

    Food makers are clearly of keeping baby food poison-free: roughly a third of the tested products did not contain worrisome metal levels. Some companies are already trying to look into the sources of contamination in their products and try to reduce them. More companies should follow. But the best chance of real change will come with laws. Currently there are no U. S rules on acceptable levels of heavy metals in baby foods.

    The government and the food industry should unite to deal with the serious threat to our children.

If you've ever seen elephant seals (象海豹) lying on a beach, you might think that they're always. sleeping. But in fact, they spend about seven months of the year in the ocean. So how do they sleep while they're in the ocean?

Even though elephant seals are large animals, they have to be careful in the ocean. Near the surface, some dangerous animals like sharks might attack(攻击)them. So elephant seals spend most of their time diving (下潜) deep underwater, looking for food.

To find out how they sleep in the deep, a scientist named Jessica Kendall-Bar created a special cap. She and her team put the caps on thirteen female young elephant seals. The caps recorded the elephant seals brain activities. They also collected information on the elephant seals' heart rates (心率), how their bodies were moving, and how deep they were.

The scientists learned that elephant seals sometimes sleep for a short time while they are diving. They only sleep for about 10 minutes at a time. As they begin to sleep, the elephant seals can control their bodies. But when they are deeply asleep, they simply begin to fall, spinning (快速旋转) in a circle "like a falling leaf". The elephant seals wake up in time to go up for more air. In shallower (较浅的) areas, the elephant seals sometimes wake upon the seafloor.

Using the information they collected from the cap-wearing elephant seals, the scientists created a computer program to study older records of elephant seal trips. The scientists found that elephant seals only sleep for about two hours a day when they're in the ocean. That means that the rest on land is very important for them. Back on land, they sleep for about 10. 8 hours a day.

The scientists hope that their work will help to protect the places where elephant seals sleep when. they're on land.