It seems that the great desire among the young is to be popular. The desire to be popular can force you into looking and acting like everyone else. You can lose yourself in a sea of identical hairstyles and thinking styles.

    I was forced to think about popularity not too long ago in a talk I had with my daughter. Margy had to change schools when my busy work schedule made it necessary for me to move houses. I suppose that, for a girl in her teens, entering a new school is like spending a season alone in the tropical jungles. At least that's how Margy found it at first. However, as the school year drew to a close, one student after another came to her. I told Margy that I would have been more concerned if she had been an instant social success in her new school. Nobody can please everyone. If you try to do so, you will find values as lasting as soap bubbles blown into the air.

    Some teenagers claim they want to dress as they please. But they all wear the same clothes. They set off in new directions in music. But somehow they all end up listening to the same record. Their reason for thinking or acting in a certain way is that the crowd is doing it. They have come out of their cocoon into a larger cocoon.

    I know that it has become harder for a young person to stand up against the popularity wave. Our way of life makes a young nonconformist stand out like a Martian. These days there's a great barrier for the young person who wants to find his or her own path. But the barrier is worth climbing over. You may want to listen to classical music instead of going to a party. Well, go to it. Be yourself. Popularity will come with the people who respect you for who you are. That's the only kind of popularity that really counts.

    Researchers at the University of Kansas say that people can accurately judge 90 percent of a stranger's personality simply by looking at the person's shoes. “Shoes convey useful information about their wearers”, the authors wrote in the new study published in the Journal of Research in Personality．

    Lead researcher Omri Gillath said the judgments were based on the style, cost, color and condition of someone's shoes. In the study, 63 University of Kansas researchers looked at pictures showing 208 different pairs of shoes worn by the study's participants. Volunteers in the study were photographed in their most commonly worn shoes, and then filled out a personality questionnaire.

    Some of the results were expected: People with higher incomes most commonly wore expensive shoes, and flashier shoes were typically worn by outgoing people. However，some of the more specific results are strange enough. For example, “practical and functional ''shoes were generally worn by more “pleasant" people, while ankle boots were more linked with “aggressive” personalities. The strangest of all may be that those who wore “uncomfortable looking” shoes tend to have “calm” personalities. And if you have several pairs of new shoes or take extreme care of them, you may suffer from “attachment anxiety", spending lots of time worrying about what other people think of your appearance. There was even a political calculation in the mix with more liberal (主张变革的) types wearing “shabbier and less expensive” shoes.

    The researchers noted that some people will choose shoe styles to mask their actual personalities, but researchers noted that volunteers were also likely to be unaware that their footwear choices were showing the deep side of their personalities.

    At times my mom has been uncomfortable seeing these qualities in me. For example, when I was 12, I went to Puerto Rico all by myself to stay with my grandmother for the summer. My mom was extremely nervous about it. She kept telling me how things were different in Puerto Rico, to always put on sunscreen, not to wander away from my grandmother, and other warnings. She helped me pack and did not leave the airport until she saw my plane take off.

    But despite her worries, she let me go on my own. As I moved into my teens, she continued to give me space to grow and learn even when it might have been difficult for her. When I reached my senior year, I decided to move away for college. Once again I found that I differed from my peers: while many of them wanted to stay close to home, I couldn't wait to be out in the world on my own. While my mom may not have been happy at the thought of me going away, she was supportive and excited for me.

    One big thing I realized during my senior year, as my mom granted me more freedom, was that she actually believes in me and trusts me. That means a lot. Most of my life, and especially when I was little, the main person I tried to impress in my schoolwork or other things was my mother. I knew she expected nothing but the best from me. Sometimes it was hard to live up to her standards; getting a single B on my report card would make me feel bad because I knew she wanted me to have all A's.

    I know that her high standards have helped me stay focused on what's important, like education, and made me who I am. I am thankful for her support and involvement in my life. Most of all I respect her. She is the strongest woman I know and that's why I have turned out so strong and independent.

    A young and successful manager was traveling down a neighborhood street, going a bit too fast in his new Jaguar.

    As his car passed a park, one child appeared, and a brick smashed into the Jaguar's side door. He stopped the car very suddenly and drove the Jag back to the spot from where the brick had been thrown. He jumped out of the car, grabbed some kid and pushed him up against a parked car, shouting, "What was that all about and who are you? Just what on earth are you doing? That's a new car and that brick you threw is going to cost a lot of money. Why did you do it?"

    "Please, sir, please, I'm sorry. I didn't know what else to do!" begged the youngster. "It's my brother," he said. "He fell out of his wheelchair and I can't lift him up."

    Sobbing, the boy asked the executive, "Would you please help me get him back into his wheelchair? He's hurt and he's too heavy for me."

    Moved beyond words, the driver tried to swallow the rapidly swelling lump(隆起的肿块)in his throat．He lifted the young mail back into the wheelchair and took out his handkerchief and wiped the scrapes(擦痕)and cuts, checking to see if everything was going to be okay.

    "Thank you, sir. And God bless you, "the grateful child said to him. The man then watched the little boy push his brother to the sidewalk toward their home.

    It was a long walk back to his Jaguar... a long, slow walk. He never did repair the side door. He kept the dent(凹痕) to remind him not to go through life so fast that someone has to throw a brick at you to get your attention.

    Life whispers in your soul and speaks to your heart. Sometimes, when you don't have the time to listen... Life throws a brick at your head.

    It's your choice: Listen to the whispers of your soul or wait for the brick!

    Mandara seemed to know something big was about to happen. So she let out a yell, caught hold of her 2-year-old daughter Kibibi and climbed up into a tree. She lives at the National Zoo in Washington D. C.

    And on Tuesday, August 23rd, witnesses said she seemed to sense the big earthquake that shook much of the East Coast before any humans knew what was going on. And she's not the only one. In the moments before the quake, an orangutan（猩猩）let out a loud call and then climbed to the top of her shelter.

    “It's very different from their normal call,” said Brandie Smith, the zookeeper. “The lemurs（monkeylike animals of Madagascar）will sound an alarm if they see or hear something highly unusual.”

    But you can't see or hear an earthquake 15 minutes before it happens, can you? Maybe you can—if you're an animal. “Animals can hear above and below our range of hearing,” said Brandie Smith. “That's part of their special abilities. They're more sensitive to the environment, which is how they survive.”

    Primates weren't the only animals that seemed to sense the quake before it happened. One of the elephants made a warning sound. And a huge lizard（蜥蜴）ran quickly for cover. The flamingoes（a kind of birds）gathered before the quake and stayed together until the shaking stopped.

    So what kind of vibrations（震动）were the animals picking up in the moments before the quake? Scientist Susan Hough said earthquakes produce two types of waves—a weak “P” wave and then a much stronger “S” wave. The “P” stands for “primary”. And the “S” stands for “secondary”. She thinks the “P” wave might be what sets the animals off.

    Not all the animals behaved unusually before the quake. For example, Smith said the zoo's giant pandas didn't jump up until the shaking actually began. But many of the other animals seemed to know something was coming before it happened. “I'm not surprised at all,” Smith said.

    Walk through the Amazon rainforest today and you will find it steamy, warm, damp and thick. But if you had been there around 15,000 years ago, during the last ice age, would it have been the same? For more than 30 years, scientists have been arguing about how rainforests might have reacted to the cold, dry climate of the ice ages, but till now, no one has reached a satisfying answer.

    Rainforests like the Amazon are important for mopping up CO2 from the atmosphere and helping to solve global warming. Currently the trees in the Amazon take in around 500 million tons of CO2 each year: equal to the total amount of CO2 given off in the UK each year. But how will the Amazon react to the future climate change? If it gets drier, will it survive and continue to draw down CO2? Scientists hope that they will be able to learn in advance how the rainforest will manage in the future by understanding how rainforests reacted to climate change in the past.

    Unfortunately, collecting information is incredibly difficult. To study the past climate, scientists need to look at fossilized pollen (花粉) kept in lake mud. Going back to the last ice age means drilling down into lake sediments (沉淀物), which requires specialized equipment and heavy machinery . There are very few roads and paths, or places to land helicopters and aeroplanes. Rivers tend to be the easiest way to enter the forest, but this still leaves vast areas between the rivers completely unsampled (未取样). So far, only a handful of cores have been drilled that go back to the last ice age and none of them provide enough information to prove how the Amazon forest reacts to climate change.