Johnson Smith
Founder and CEO
Johnson Review

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.

    World Elephant Day is the perfect time to find out more about these amazing animals and what we can do to preserve them so they do not go the way of the mammoth（猛犸象）.

    World Elephant Day was created in 2011 by two Canadian filmmakers Patricia Sims and Thailand's Elephant Reintroduction Foundation and was first celebrated on August 12, 2012. They made the documentary Return to the Forest, a fascinating 30 minute film about the reintroduction of caught Asian elephants to the wild.

    Currently, the demand for ivory（象牙）is becoming bigger and bigger, whose price is higher than that of gold, making elephants bigger targets than ever. Habitation loss is also a danger to the world's elephant population as it robs elephants of the hundreds of pounds of food they need every day, making it more difficult for them to breed and making it easier for hunters to track them down. Circuses and tourism are also serious threats to the animals' well-being.

    The best way to celebrate this day is to take the opportunity to educate yourself about these magnificent（巨大的）mammals and share your knowledge with others. As ever, simply spreading the word about the dangers these magnificent mammals face via social media can actually make a real change. Expose that “training” elephants often involves tying and beating them daily for months on end. If you want to get a bit more involved, you could choose to make a donation to a foundation dedicated to protecting elephants from hunters or relocating them to locations better suited to their needs.

    Whichever way suits you best, make sure that you spend this day in a way that helps elephants all over the world, so we, in turn, can continue to wonder at them and their uniquely fascinating way of life.

    Hobbs was an orphan(孤儿). He worked in a factory and every day he got a little money. Hard work changed him thin and weak. He wanted to borrow a lot of money to learn to paint pictures, but he did not think he could pay off the debts.

   One day the lawyer said to him, "One thousand dollars, and here is the money." As Hobbs took the package of notes, he was very dumbfounded (惊呆的). He didn't know where the money came from and how to spend it. He said to himself, "I could go to find a hotel and live like a rich man for a few days; or I give up my work in the factory and do what I'd like to do: painting pictures I could do that for a few weeks, but what would I do after that? I should have lost my place of the factory and have no money to live on. If it were a little less money, I would buy a new coat, or a radio, or give a dinner to my friends. If it were more, I could give up the work and pay for painting pictures. But it's too much for one and too little for the other."

    "Here is the reading of your uncle's will," said the lawyer, "telling what is to be done with this money after his death. I must ask you to remember one point. Your uncle has said you must bring me a paper showing exactly what you did with his money, as soon as you have spent it."

    "Yes, I see. I'll do that." said the young man.

    Father's Day is celebrated today in 75 countries around the world. In my personal world, it's a day I like to think of my father's father.

    I learned a lot in my later life from my dad. But I learned something else, as a kid not even yet in school, from my grandfather. I learned to be curious. Little things fathers and grandfathers do can change the life of a child forever. In my case, this change came from necessity: My mom needed someone to look after little Allen, barely 4 years old, during the school day. My grandmother volunteered, and my grandfather came up with a way I could be watched while he worked in his clockmaker's shop.

    He seated me on a chair every day while I was there, right in front of his big workbench. He told me stories. He had a great sense of humor and a funny way of making a "buh-buh-buh" sound when he sensed my attention was weakening, and he encouraged me to ask questions about anything he was doing.

    Naturally, I was usually asking questions about clocks--what made the hands move, what the pendulum(钟摆) did, why you had to stop winding just before the weight hit the stop. Sometimes I just asked about which shiny parts went where.

    Most of all, he showed me how clocks worked. He treated me as if I were a sort of small grown-up. He never talked down to me, never told me I was "too young to understand".

    And so my grandfather granted me two things: A love of clocks, and an everlasting curiosity.

    As a journalist, I turned that fascination into explanations of why computers and software do what they do——and, perhaps even more importantly, why they fail at that task. I haven't been afraid of opening up the innards and looking for what is wrong with the computer.

    I've come back to check on a baby. Just after dusk I'm in a car down a muddy road in the rain, past rows of shackled (戴镣的) elephants, their trunks swinging. I was here five hours before, when the sun was high and hot and tourists were on elephants' backs.

    Walking now, I can hardly see the path with my phone's flashlight. When the wooden fence post stops me short, I point my light down and follow a current of rainwater across the floor until it washes up against three large, gray feet. A fourth foot twisted above the surface, tied tightly by a short chain and choked by ring of metal spikes (尖刺). When the elephant gets tired and puts her foot down, the spikes press deeper into her ankle.

    Meena is four years and two months old, still a child as elephants go. Khammon Kongkhaw, her caretaker, told me earlier that Meena wears the spiked chain because she tends to kick. Kongkhaw has been responsible for Meena here at Maetaman Elephant Adventure, near Chiang Mai, in northern Thailand, since she was 11 months old. He said he keeps her on the spiked chain only during the day and takes it off at night. But it's night now.

    I ask Jin Laoshen, the Maetaman worker, why her chain is still on. He says he doesn't know.

    Maetaman is one of many animal attractions in and around tourist-crowded Chiang Mai. Meena's life is set to follow the same track as many of the roughly 3,800 captive (被捕获的) elephants in Thailand. When Meena is too old or sick to give rides—maybe at 55, maybe at 75, she'll die. If she's lucky, she'll get a few years of retirement. She'll spend most of her life on a chain.