French surgeons have performed what they said on Wednesday was the world's first partial face transplant（移植）— giving a new nose, chin and lips to a woman attacked by a dog.

    Specialists from two French hospitals carried out the operation on a 38-year-old woman on Sunday in the northern city of Amiens by taking the face from a brain-dead woman, who had hanged herself just hours before the operation. Her family agreed on the operation.

    “The patient is in an excellent state and the transplant looks normal,” the hospitals said in a brief statement after waiting three days to announce the pioneering surgery.

    The woman had been left without a nose and lips after the dog attacked her last May, and was unable to talk or chew properly. Such injuries are “extremely difficult, if not impossible” to repair using normal surgical techniques, the statement said.

    The statement did not say what the woman would look like when she had fully recovered, but medical experts said she was unlikely to resemble the woman who had been the source of her new face.

    The operation was led by Jean-Michel Dubernard, a specialist from a hospital in Lyon who has also carried out hand transplants.

    Skin transplants have long been used to treat burns and other injuries, but operations around the mouth and nose have been considered very difficult because of the area's high sensitivity（敏感） to foreign tissue.

    Teams in France, the United States and Britain had been developing techniques to make face transplants a reality

    There was a short-term risk for the patient if blood vessels became blocked, a medium-term danger of her body rejecting the new skin and a long-term possibility that the drugs used could cause cancers.

    Experts say that although such medical advances should be celebrated, the transplant had thrown up moral（道德的）and ethical(伦理的)issues. Little is known about the psychological effect of three transplant.

The practice of students endlessly copying letters and sentences from a blackboard is a thing of the past. With the coming of new technologies like computers and smartphone, writing by hand has become something of nostalgic (怀旧的)skill. However, while today's educators are using more and more technology in their teaching, many believe basic handwriting skills are still necessary for students to be successful—both in school and in life.

    Virginia Berninger, professor of educational psychology at the University of Washington, says it's important to continue teaching handwriting and help children acquire the skill of writing by hand.

Berninger and her colleagues conducted a study that looked at the ability of students to complete various writing tasks—both on a computer and by hand. The study, published in 2009, found that when writing with a pen and paper, participants wrote longer essays and more complete sentences and had a faster word production rate.

    In a more recent study, Berninger looked at what role spelling plays in a student's writing skills and found that how well children spell is tied to know well they can write. “Spelling makes some of the thinking parts of the brain active which helps us access our vocabulary, word meaning and concepts. It is allowing our written language to connect with ideas.” Berninger said.

    Spelling helps students translate ideas into words in their mind first and then to transcribe(转换) “those words in the mind written symbols on paper or keyboard and screen,” the study said. Seeing the words in the “mind's eye” helps children not only to turn their ideas into words, says Berninger, but also to spot(发现) spelling mistakes when they write the words down and to correct then over time.

     “In our computer age, some people believe that we don't have to teach spelling because we have spell checks,” she said. “But until a child has a functional spelling ability of about a fifth grade level, they won't have the knowledge to choose the correct spelling among the options given by the computer.”

    It was an autumn morning shortly after my husband and I moved into our first house. Our children were upstairs unpacking, and I was looking out of the window at my father moving around mysteriously on the front lawn. “What are you doing out there?” I called to him.

    He looked up, smiling. “I'm making you a surprise.'' I thought it could be just about anything. When we were kids, he always created something surprising for us. Today, however, Dad would say no more, and caught up in the business of our new life, I eventually forgot about his surprise.

    Until one gloomy day the next March when I glanced out of the window, I saw a dot of blue across the yard. I headed outside for a closer look. They were crocuses (番红花) throughout the front lawn—blue, yellow and my favorite pink, with little faces moving up and down in the cold wind. I remembered the things Dad secretly planted last autumn. He knew how the darkness and dullness of winter always got me down. What could have been more perfectly timely to my needs?

    My father's crocuses bloomed (开花) each spring for the next five seasons, always bringing the same assurance: Hard times are almost over. Hold on, keep going, and light is coming soon.

    Then a spring came with only half the usual blooms and the next spring there were none. I missed the crocuses, so I would ask Dad to come over and plant new bulbs (块茎植物). But I never did. He died suddenly one October day. My family were in deep sorrow, leaning on our faith.

    On a spring afternoon four years later, I was driving back when I felt depressed. It was Dad's birthday, and I found myself thinking about him. This was not unusual-my family often talked about him, remembering how he lived up to his faith. Suddenly I slowed as I turned into our driveway. I stopped and stared at the lawn. There on the muddy grass with small piles of melting snow, bravely waving in the wind, was one pink crocus.

    How could a flower bloom from a bulb more than 18 years ago, one that hadn't bloomed in over a decade? But there was the crocus. Tears filled my eyes as I realized its significance.

    Hold on, keep going, and light is coming soon. The pink crocus bloomed for only a day, but it built my faith for a lifetime.

Dear Mom and Dad,

    I'm afraid I have some very bad news for you. I have been very naughty and the school master is very angry with me. She is going to write to you. You must come and take me away from here. She does not want me in the school any longer. The trouble started last night when I was smoking a cigarette in bed. As I was smoking, I heard footsteps coming towards the room .I did not want a teacher to catch me smoking, so I threw the cigarette away. Unfortunately, the cigarette fell into the waste--paper basket. It caught fire.

    There was a curtain near the waste --paper basket. It caught fire too. Soon the whole room was burning. The master phoned the fire brigade. The school is a long way from the town and before the fire brigade arrived, the whole school was on fire. The master said that the fire was all my fault and I must pay for the damage. She will send you a bill for about a million dollars.

    I'm very sorry for this.

    Much love

Sarah

    Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region is an important ecological screen for the north of China and even the whole country. Building a green great wall to ensure China's ecological security is one of the most important things of autonomous region.

The largest ecological function zone in the north of China, Inner Mongolia has a variety of landscapes, including forests, grasslands, wetlands, rivers and lakes. In recent years, the region's environment has improved, with its forest and grassland area having increased and desert reduced.

    However, it still faces a number of challenges in ecological preservation. For instance, the region faces severe water shortages with the number of lakes dropping from 427 in 1987 to 145 in 2010. In addition to a lack of rainfall, huge water consumption in agricultural and industrial production has worsened the water shortage. Too much use of fertilizers has damaged the soil and affected the growth of grass, accelerating the expansion of the desert, which results from a lack of water.

The local government encourages planting trees on grassland as they can get more pay for trees than by growing grass. However, the trees they plant often have a low survival rate as they have a high water consumption rate. Also, to treat wetlands, some areas have planted a large number of a single tree species. This practice may damage biodiversity (生物多样性) and endanger the survival of certain animals.

Experts suggest taking the region's water resources and weather conditions into consideration in future ecological projects.

In life, once on a path, we tend to follow it, for better or worse. What's sad is that even if it's the latter, we often accept it anyway because we are so used to the way things are that we don't even recognize that they could be different. This is a phenomenon psychologist call functional fixedness.

This classic experiment will give you an idea of how it works and a sense of whether you may have fallen into the same trap: People are given a box of tacks (大头钉) and some matches and asked to find a way to attach a candle to a wall so that it burns properly.

Typically, the subjects try tacking the candle to the wall or lighting it to fix it with melted wax. The psychologists had, of course, arranged it so that neither of these obvious approaches would work. The tacks are too short, and the paraffin (石蜡) doesn't stick to the wall. So how can you complete the task? The successful technique is to use the tack box as a candle-holder. You empty it, tack it to the wall. and stand the candle inside it. To think of that, you have to look beyond the box's usual role as a receptacle just for tacks and re-imagine it serving an entirely new purpose. That is difficult because we all suffer to one degree or another from functional fixedness.

The inability to think in new ways affects people in every corner of society. The political theorist Hannah Arendt coined the phrase" frozen thoughts" to describe deeply held ideas that we no longer question but should. In Arendt's eyes, the self- content reliance on such accepted "truths" also made people blind to ideas that didn't fit their worldview, even when there was plenty of evidence for them.

Frozen thinking has nothing to do with intelligence. She said," It can be found in highly intelligent people."