In many parts of the world, there are four seasons: spring, summer, fall and winter. In the U.S., there are only three: football, basketball and baseball. If you want to know what season it is, just have a look at what people are playing.

    For many people in the U.S., sports are not just for fun. They're almost a religion. Thousands of sports fans buy expensive tickets to watch their favourite teams and athletes play in person. Other fans watch the games at home. The most devoted sports buffs never miss a game. Many a wife becomes a “sports widow (寡妇)” during her husband's favorite season.

    America's devotion to athletics has created a new class of wealthy people: professional athletes. Sports stars often receive million -dollar salaries. Some even make big money appearing in advertisements for soft drinks, shoes and even toiletries (化妆品).

    Sports are an important part of Americans' culture. Throughout their school life, Americans learn to play many sports. All students take physical education classes in school. Some try out for the school teams, while others join school sports leagues. Athletic events at universities attract scores of fans and benefit the whole community.

    Car companies are developing vehicles that will plug into electric sockets(电源插座), just like many laptops, digital cameras, cell phones and MP4 do. Called "plug-in vehicles", these cars will get most of their power from electricity. Their drivers won't have to stop at gas stations as often as usual.

    The technology is more than just cool. In our car-filled world, plug-in vehicles could reduce the amount of gas we use, which keeps rising in cost now and then. Besides, driving around in these vehicles may even help the environment. Gas-burning cars produce a lot of greenhouse gas, which causes global warming.

    The first company-produced plug-in vehicles could hit the roads by 2020. But engineers still have a lot of work to do to make the technology practical and inexpensive.

    Batteries are the biggest challenge. In the plug-in-vehicle world, Li-ion(锂离子)batteries are getting the most attention. These batteries can store a large amount of energy in a small package, and they last a longer time between charges. Li-ion batteries can fit laptops, cell phones, heart instruments and other similar pocket ones.

    But because cars are so big and heavy, it would still require a suitcase-sized Li-ion batteries to power about 12km of driving. What's more, the batteries are much expensive.

    "A car filled with batteries could go a long distance," says Ted Bohn, an electrical engineer in Chicago. "But it couldn't pull any people, and it would cost $100,000." So researchers need to work out how to make batteries smaller and cheaper, among other questions.

    "The answers don't exist yet." Bohn says, "As a kid, I thought someone someplace knows the answer to everything. All of these questions haven't been decided. But that's what engineering is about--making a guess, running tests and getting fine results."

    "Hey, little boy, will you support me when I'm getting old?" Wang Wenshan, 35, asked his newborn baby as he hugged him at home.

    The Chinese tradition of raising sons to support parents in their old age has been weakened by the rapidly growing economy and improved standard of living. As is the case with more and more developed countries, China faces an aging society. People are living longer and having fewer children. Therefore, many Chinese families are falling into a 4-2-1 family pattern: a couple raises one child and supports four elderly parents. But few realize that a problem is likely to happen ahead.

    The aging of the population is a trend that now affects a growing number of countries. The Information Office of the State Council, China's cabinet, issued（发行） a white paper on measures China has been taking to help its elderly population. The paper said China's population entered the aging period at the end of the 20th century and the proportion of people aged 60 and above accounted for over 10 percent of the entire population. By the end of 2005, China had nearly 144 million people over 60, accounting for 11 percent of the population, according to the white paper.

An expanding aged population inevitably means that many issues must be settled, as the problem concerns every aspect of society. It puts more pressure on each family, causing disturbing economic consequences and serious social problems. It also challenges the labor force supply and the pension system.

    "I used to think that it's not an issue for me to provide for the aged," said Wang, whose parents and parents-in-law all enjoy pensions and medical insurance. But last year Wang's father suffered from a serious illness and afterward Wang began to feel the pressure on his shoulders.

    After his father recovered, Wang opened a bank account for each parent and put away some money in the account every month to prepare for future uncertainties. In addition, he has to save money every month to provide for his son's future education. "I'm now breaking my back to support my family: saving pensions for the parents, my son's education funds, and living costs."

    Wang also bought some commercial old-age insurance for himself. "We have to take precautions（预防） before it is too late, and many of my colleagues share the same view," he said.

    British children used to play conkers (板栗游戏) in the autumn when the horse-chestnut trees started to drop their shiny brown nuts. They would select a suitable chestnut, drill a hole in it and thread it onto a string, then swing their conker at that of an opponent until one of them broke. But the game has fallen out of favour. Children spend less time outdoors and rarely have access to chestnut trees. Besides, many schools have banned conkers games, worried that they might cause injuries or nut allergies.

    That sort of risk-averseness(规避风险) now spreads through every aspect of childhood. Playgrounds have all the excitement designed out of them to make them safe. Many governments, particularly in societies such as America, have tightened up their rules, requiring parents to supervise(监管) young children far more closely than in the past. Frank Furedi of the University of Kent, a critic on modern parenting, argues that allowing children to play unsupervised or leaving them at home alone is increasingly described as a symptom of irresponsible parenting.

    In part, such increased caution is a response to the huge wave of changes. Large-scale urbanization, smaller and more mobile families, the move of women into the labor market and the digitization of many aspects of life have unavoidably changed the way that people bring up their children. There is little chance that any of these trends will be changed, so today's more intensive(精细化 ) parenting style is likely to go on.

    Such parenting practices now embraced by wealthy parents in many parts of the rich world, particularly in America, go far beyond an adjustment to changes in external conditions. They mean a strong bid to ensure that the advantages enjoyed by the parents' generation are passed on to their children. Since success in life now turns mainly on education, such parents will do their best to provide their children with the schooling, the character training and the social skills that will secure access to the best universities and later the most attractive jobs.

    To some extent that has always been the case. But there are more such parents now, and they are competing with each other for what economists call positional goods. This competition starts even before the children are born. The wealthy classes will take their time to select a suitable spouse and get married, and will start a family only when they feel ready for it.

    Children from less advantaged backgrounds, by contrast, often appear before their parents are ready for them. In America 60% of births to single women under 30 are unplanned, and over 40% of children are born outside marriage. The result, certainly in America, has been to widen already massive social inequalities yet further.

    All the evidence suggests that children from poorer backgrounds are at a disadvantage almost as soon as they are born. By the age of five or six they are far less "school-ready" than their better-off peers, so any attempts to help them catch up have to start long before they get to school. America has had some success with various schemes involving regular home visits by nurses or social workers to low-income families with new babies. It also has long experience with programmes for young children from poor families that combine support for parents with good-quality child care. Such programmes do seem to make a difference. Without extra effort, children from low-income families in most countries are much less likely than their better-off peers to attend preschool education, even though they are more likely to benefit from it. And data from the OECD's PISA programme suggest that children need at least two years of preschool education to perform at their best when they are 15.

    So the most promising way to ensure greater equality may be to make early-years education and care for more widely available and more affordable, as it is in the Nordics. Some governments are already rethinking their educational priorities, shifting some of their spending to the early years.

    Most rich countries decided more than a century ago that free, compulsory education for all children was a worthwhile investment for society. There is now an argument for starting preschool education earlier, as some countries have already done. In the face of crushing new inequalities, a modern version of that approach is worth trying.

    "I'm the smartest kid in class." We all want our kids to be self-confident, but unrealistic perception(认知) of their academic abilities, a new study finds, damage a child's relationship with others in the classroom: The more one student feels unrealistically superior(更好的) to another, the less the two students like each other.

Katrin Rentzsch of Bamberg University in Germany first became interested in the effects of such self-perception when she was studying how people became labeled as nerds(书呆子). "I really got interested in the question of whether it's OK to boast(吹嘘) about achievements," she says.

    This line of thinking led her towards something psychologists call "self-enhancement" －when a person feels unrealistically superior to someone else. So Rentzsch and her colleague Michela Schroder-Abe decided to take a closer look at how such self-enhancement affects relationships, so they turned to the eighth-grade classroom, somewhere they could measure differences between actual academic performance, and social popularity. The 358 students came from 20 eighth-grade classes in schools in southeast Germany.

    The researchers asked each student to rate their classmates, in terms of their likability and of their feelings of academic superiority. They then compared those ratings with the students' grades in math, physics, German and English. Importantly, they conducted the analysis at two different social levels: "habitual"－the way people act in general, and "relationship"－the way someone acts around a specific individual.

    In future work, Rentzsch would like to look at these effects on adults, perhaps specifically in team work. She's also interested in self-enhancement beyond academic achievements, for example physical attractiveness. And another question to explore is why students overestimate their academic abilities. Perhaps it is because of too much praise from their parents or teachers.

Narayana Peesapaty was sitting on a flight when he noticed a passenger trying to reach food with a biscuit after breaking his spoon. At that moment, the researcher's mind gave birth to a simple yet revolutionary concept — edible spoons.

How do you like your spoon?

Peesapaty's company, Bakeys, makes edible spoons mainly out of sorghum(高粱）though rice, wheat and water are also ingredients. They combine to form a dry eating tool that remains hard even when used in moist or hot foods. Bakeys also makes ginger and garlic flavored(风味) spoons to meet specific requests. All spoons are completely natural and acceptable for nearly all diets.

A rice replacement

An environmentally-minded water researcher, Peesapaty, designed his spoons to be eco-friendly in several ways. Sorghum was chosen as the main ingredient of the spoons instead of rice, which requires 60 times as much water. Sorghum was also chosen for the strength it would lend eating tool, and the grain requires little water, low energy and no chemicals to grow.

In place of plastic

The goal that Peesapaty hopes to attain through Bakeys is to prevent plastic from any contact with food. Plastic products can contain cancer-causing substances that come into food, and average plastic bottles take 450 years to break down. In contrast, a Bakeys' spoon is nutritious and break down in 10 days or less if thrown away. Peesapaty admits that using plastic is cheaper, but he also says that his spoons will be equally inexpensive when mass-produced.