After a confirmed rabies(狂犬病) case in Parke County, Indiana, experts are urging caution if you find a bat(蝙蝠) in your home or office.

    “If you try to kill a bat, you are more likely to get bitten,” said Joy O'Keefe, assistant professor of biology and director of Indiana State University's Centre for Bat Research, Outreach and Conservation. “Most bats people find in their houses are healthy and are not going to bite them and give them rabies.” But they could be a federally endangered species, such as the Indiana Bat, which is found in this area.

    So if you spot a bat in your home or office, don't kill it or touch it with bare hands, O'Keefe said. Instead, put on a pair of heavy gloves and gently move it into a box or bucket. Once contained, the bat can be removed outside.

    “If it's a healthy bat, it'll fly away eventually,” O'Keefe said. “If it doesn't move or seem to be healthy, you can take it to the health department to be tested.”

    This is the time of year when bats move from their summer resting sites to their winter resting sites, O'Keefe said.

    “We get calls every year during the first month of school year from people finding bats in the university's buildings,” said O'Keefe.

    Bats are a great help to people, as every night they can eat up to their entire body weight of insects. Bats, however, are facing great threats from epidemics(流行性疾病), habitat destruction and other things.

    “The best way the average person can help bats is by understanding them and by telling other people how awesome bats are and what bats do for us,” O' Keefe said. “Hopefully, it will make people think that if there's a bat in their house, they should try to get it out but not kill it. That would be really positive for bats—to not have people be one of their major threats.”

    Hidden from the noise of Washington, D.C., Hillwood Museum is a special treasure. It contains (包含) one of the finest personal collections (收藏) of Russian and French art in the world.

    Hillwood Museum was once the home of Marjorie Merriweather Post. She was a rich businesswoman. She owned one of the largest food companies in the United States. She was also very interested in collecting beautiful French art and furniture.

    She moved to Russia in the 1930s as her third husband, Joseph Davies, became the American ambassador (大使) in Moscow. Marjorie Merriweather Post had a love for Russian art as well. She bought the house in Washington in 1955 and she wanted to make it into a museum after her death. Many art experts helped Mrs. Post create its fine collection.

    Hillwood has many rooms which are filled with her treasures. Visitors can see beautiful music boxes from the eighteenth century and colorful paintings of European princesses (公主). Experts say the ancient wood and gold furniture from France is some of the finest ever made. Visitors can even look at Mrs. Post's jewels and clothes.

    The museum also has several beautiful gardens. One is designed like the gardens in Japan. It has a bridge and visitors can watch flowers floating in the water. Flowers are also grown all the year in a special glass building or greenhouse. These flowers are placed in the house throughout the year.

After a walk, visitors can rest at a nearby eating place. They can also buy objects to remember this special museum.

    Winter is the perfect time to see Washington in a different light. The crowds have thinned, and those humid 95-degree days are long gone. And the National Zoo is a different experience because of 500,000 bulbs that illuminate the annual Zoo-lights celebration.

    Eco-friendly twinkly lights will decorate zoo walkways, trees and buildings. Sculptures featuring popular zoo residents, including elephants and giant pandas, light up in time to music.

    If walking and watching isn't enough excitement, head to Lion & Tiger Hill, home to a 150-foot-long snow-less tubing run. Rides on the trackless train and the carousel also will be available.

    Don't forget to visit a few of the zoo's real animals. The Kids' Farm, Reptile Discovery Center, Small Mammal House, Think Tank (orangutans) and Great Cats exhibit will be open in the evening. There's no guarantee, however, that the animals will be as lively as the humans in attendance.

    When: Friday to January 1 (except December 24-25), 5 to 9 p.m.

    Where: 3001 Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington, D.C.

    How much: Admission is free; limited parking is $22. Charges for tubing, train rides and carousel rides.

    For more information: A parent can visit nationalzoo.si.edu/events/zoolights.

    More ZooLights celebrations: For those outside of the D.C. area, here are some links to other zoos with similar events (not all are free):

    Columbus Zoo, Ohio: Through January 1.

    Detroit Zoo, Michigan: Through December 31.

    Denver Zoo, Colorado: December 2-January 1.

    Houston Zoo, Texas: Through January 15.

    The human face is a remarkable piece of work. The astonishing variety of facial features helps people recognize each other and is vital to the formation of complex societies. So is the face's ability to send emotional signals, whether through an unconscious red face or the artifice of a false smile. People spend much of their waking lives reading faces, for signs of attraction, hatred, trust and fraud. They also spend plenty of time trying to hide true feelings or intentions.

    Technology is rapidly catching up with the human ability to read faces. In America facial recognition is used by churches to track worshippers' attendance; in Britain, by retailers to spot past shoplifters. In China, it confirms the identities of ride-hailing drivers, permits tourists to enter attractions and lets people pay for things with a smile. Apple's new iPhone is expected to use it to unlock the home screen.

    Set against human skills, such applications might seem incremental(增值的). Some breakthroughs, such as flight or the Internet, obviously transform human abilities; facial recognition seems merely to encode(编码)them. Although faces are unique to individuals, they are also public, so technology does not, at first sight, interfere with something that is private. And yet the ability to record, store and analyze images of faces cheaply, quickly and on a vast scale promises one day to bring about fundamental changes to opinions of privacy, fairness and trust.

    Start with privacy. One big difference between faces and other biometric data, such as fingerprints, is that they work at a distance. Anyone with a phone can take a picture for facial-recognition programs to use. Facebook's bank of facial images cannot be used by others, but the Silicon Valley giant could obtain pictures of visitors to a car showroom, say, and later use facial recognition to serve them ads for cars. Law-enforcement agencies now have a powerful weapon in their ability to track criminals, but at enormous potential cost to citizens' privacy.

    The face is not just a name-tag. It displays a lot of other information—and machines can read that, too. Again, that promises benefits. Some firms are analyzing faces to provide automated diagnoses of rare genetic conditions, far earlier than would otherwise be possible. Systems that measure emotion may give autistic(孤独症的)people a grasp of social signals they find difficult.

A facial expression results from one or more motions of the muscles of the face. These movements convey the emotional nonverbal communication. They are a primary means of conveying social information among humans, but also occur in most other mammals and some other animal species.

In the business world, much emphasis is placed on your first words, but it isn't all about what you say. You only have seconds to make a first impression that can make or break a relationship in business. Since the face is the first thing we notice about a person, it's vital to use your face to make that important connection.

Researchers have shown that 55 percent of non-verbal communication is facial. People generally try to mask negative expressions such as disappointment, fear or envy, but these feelings are often reflected in their eyes, or the downward turn of the mouth.

Genuine expressions of anger and surprise can be quite brief, lasting for only a few seconds. If an expression remains longer, it may be a sign of insincerity (不真诚). In general, a genuine expression matches the beginnings of a feeling, so watch for expressions that come after the words.

The research conducted last year by a team from Glasgow University, suggested that people from different cultures read facial expressions differently. Not only can that mean confusion in everyday life, but it can lead to confusion when conducting business.

The study found that East Asian participants tended to focus on the eyes of the other person, while Western subjects took in the whole face, including the eyes and the mouth. The work, which was published in Current Biology journal challenged the idea that facial expressions are universally understood. In the study, East Asians were more likely than Westerners to read the expression for "fear" as "surprise", and "disgust "as "anger".

I remember that every year in lunar December in my hometown, Xinyang, each family begins to prepare bunches of bacon and sausage hanging from yard to yard {#blank#}1{#/blank#} (embrace) the upcoming New Year. Walking in such a street view and sniffing the smell of pickled bacon (腊肉), I always have a sense of {#blank#}2{#/blank#} (happy).

Xinyang, located on the boundary between the north and the south, is rich in rice, wheat and fertile land due to its unique {#blank#}3{#/blank#} (geography) position and climate. Therefore, it cultivates the characteristics of Xinyang people who have a good appetite {#blank#}4{#/blank#} delicacies. According to relevant records, the history of Xinyang's pickled bacon dates back to the Ming Dynasty, {#blank#}5{#/blank#} the locals learned to keep its special taste by preserving it in a special wooden bucket. People in Xinyang love their life so much that even during the toughest times, they still inherited the soul of taste and made delicious pickled bacon. Actually, Xinyang's pickled bacon is made in a {#blank#}6{#/blank#} seemingly simple way by drying the meat in the shade but it brings out the flavor of the food {#blank#}7{#/blank#} (it) and stays with our memory for long.

You'll never become fully conscious of how much you value it until you {#blank#}8{#/blank#} (tear) apart from it. Such is Xinyang's pickled bacon, one of my {#blank#}9{#/blank#} (forget) memories of my hometown despite time {#blank#}10{#/blank#} (tick) by.