Last year I ruined my summer vacation by bringing along a modern convenience that was too convenient for my own good: the iPad. Instead of looking at nature, I checked my email. Instead of paddling a small boat, I followed my Twitter feed (推特简讯). Instead of reading great novels, I stuck to reading four newspapers each morning. I was behaving as if I were still in the office. My body was on vacation but my head wasn't.

    So this year I made up my mind to try something different: withdrawal (退出) from the Internet. I knew it wouldn't be easy, since I'm bad at self-control. But I was determined. I started by giving the iPad to my wife.

    The cellphone signal at our house was worse than in the past, making my attempts at cheating an experience in frustration (沮丧). I was trapped, forced to go through with my plan. Largely cut off from e-mail, Twitter and my favorite newspaper websites, I had few ways to connect to the world except for radio and how much radio can one listen to, really? I had to do what I had planned to all along: read books.

    This experience has had a happy ending. With determination and the strong support of my wife, I won in my vacation struggle against the Internet, realizing finally that it was I, not the iPad, that was the problem.I knew I had won when we passed a Starbucks and my wife asked if I wanted to stop to use the Wi-Fi. “ I don't need it,” I said.  

    However, as we return to post -vacation life, a harder test begins: Can I continue when I'm back at work? There are times when the need to know what's being said right now is great. And I have no intention of giving up my convenience completely. But I hope to resist the temptation (诱惑) to check my e-mail every five minutes, which leads to checking my Twitter feed and a website or two.

    I think a vacation is supposed to help you reset your brain to become more productive. Here I hope this one worked.

    America is a mobile society. Friendships between Americans can be close and real, yet disappear soon if situations change. Neither side feels hurt by this. Both may exchange Christmas greetings for a year or two, perhaps a few letters for a while — then no more. If the same two people meet again by chance, even years later, they pick up the friendship. This can be quite difficult for us Chinese to understand, because friendships between us flower more slowly but then may become lifelong feelings, extending (延伸) sometimes deeply into both families.

    Americans are ready to receive us foreigners at their homes, share their holidays, and their home life. They will enjoy welcoming us and be pleased if we accept their hospitality (好客) easily.

    Another difficult point for us Chinese to understand Americans is that although they include us warmly in their personal everyday lives, they don't show their politeness to us if it requires a great deal of time. This is usually the opposite of the practice in our country where we may be generous with our time. Sometimes, we, as hosts, will appear at airports even in the middle of the night to meet a friend. We may take days off to act as guides to our foreign friends. The Americans, however, express their welcome usually at homes, but truly can not manage the time to do a great deal with a visitor outside their daily routine. They will probably expect us to get ourselves from the airport to our own hotel by bus. And they expect that we will phone them from there. Once we arrive at their homes, the welcome will be full, warm and real. We will find ourselves treated hospitably.

    For the Americans, it is often considered more friendly to invite a friend to their homes than to go to restaurants, except for purely business matters. So accept their hospitality at home!

    Hello,everybody.Welcome to surf on a new Web site—SCIENCE NEWS FOR KIDS!

    Our goal is to offer timely items of interest to kids,accompanied by suggestions for hands on activities,books, articles,Web resources,and other useful materials.

    Our emphasis is on making the Web site attractive by offering kids opportunities to comment on and grade the subject matter,get ideas for science projects,and try out math puzzles.At the same time,we offer teachers creative ways of using science news in their classrooms.

    The Science News for Kids Web site,supported by several corporations and foundations,strengthens the usefulness of Science News in the middle－school classroom and offers entertaining reading and activities for students interested in science.

    A section of the Science News for Kids Web site is devoted to particular interests.At present,we have six such zones: a weekly brainteaser（难题）for those who enjoy solving and inventing puzzles (PuzzleZone),entertaining science－fiction composition exercises for those interested in writing (SciFiZone),and weekly science short description along with science project ideas and tips (ScienceFairZone).The GameZone contains a small selection of logic and memory games.The TeacherZone has materials,including question sheets related to the feature article of the week,so that teachers can bring science news topics to the classroom.The LabZone features a weekly hands on activity or science project idea.In the future,we might add additional zones,for example,for kids interested in robotics,the environment,computers,math,or veterinary（兽医的）medicine and animals.

    Contact us at editor@snkids.com.         Science News for Kids            1719 N Street,N.W.

    Washington,DC 20036                 Phone :202-785-2255             Fax: 202-659-0365

    When I told my father that I was moving to Des Moines, Iowa, he told me about the only time he had been there. It was in the 1930s, when he was an editor of the literary magazine of Southern Methodist University（SMU）in Dallas, Texas. He also worked as a professor at SMU, and there was a girl student in his class who suffered from a serious back disease. She couldn't afford the operation because her family was poor.

    Her mother ran a boardinghouse in Galveston, a seaside town near Houston, Texas. She was cleaning out the attic（阁楼）one day when she came across an old dusty manuscript（手稿）. On its top page were the words, “By O. Henry”. It was a nice story, and she sent it to her daughter at SMU, who showed it to my father. My father had never read the story before, but it sounded like O. Henry, and he knew that O. Henry had once lived in Houston. So it was possible that the famous author had gone to the beach and stayed in the Galveston boardinghouse, and had written the story there and left the manuscript behind by accident. My father visited an O. Henry expert at Columbia University in New York, whoauthenticatedthe story as O. Henry's.

My father then set out to sell it. Eventfully, he found himself in Des Moines, meeting with Gardner Cowles, a top editor at the Des Moines Register. Cowles loves the story and bought it on the spot. My father took the money to the girl. It was just enough for her to have the operation she so desperately needed.

My father never told me what the O. Henry story was about. But I doubt that it could have been better than his own story.

    The family of a 6-year-old adopted Chinese girl who badly needs a bone marrow transplant (骨髓移植) believes they have found a match in China.

    Kailee Wells suffers from a serious aplastic anemia (再生障碍性贫血), which prevents bone marrow from producing new blood cells. She has taken courses of treatment but has shown little sign of recovery.

The best help for such patients is a transplant of healthy marrow or blood cells from a suitable donor. Certain tissue of the patient and the donor must match.

    Kailee's mother, Linda Wells, made her second trip to China earlier this month to find a donor. Her husband, Owen Wells, said that his wife believed doctors there had found a match.

     “For these last 22 months, we've been living in fear that Kailee would take a turn for the worse and there would be nothing we could do about it,” he said. “Now we have something we can use and save our little girl. We are just about ready to start jumping up and down and rejoicing.”

    Wells said a Chinese girl who is about a year old has a blood sample that matches Kailee's perfectly. The next step, he said, would be to make sure the sample is safely harvested and protected for transplant, the details of which have yet to be worked out.

    Linda Wells first traveled to China in February to try to locate the girl's birth mother, who is likely to be a match. But she found no relatives and decided to try again this month.

    “This gives us so much encouragement because now we found what we thought we would never be able to find for Kailee,” Owen Wells said. “We're going to continue our blood donor drive to try to continue to help as many people as we possibly can. We're just so happy.”

    On May 29, 1973, Thomas Bradley, a black man, was elected mayor of Los Angeles. Los Angeles is the third largest city in the United States, with a population of three million. About sixteen percent of the city's population are black.

    News of this election appeared on the front pages of newspapers everywhere in the United States. Here is how one major newspaper reported the event.

    LOS ANGELES ELECTS BRADLEY MAYOR UNSEATING YORTY

    BLACK WINS 56% OF VOTES

    Bradley called his victory over Yorty "the fulfillment of a dream". During his childhood and youth, people had kept telling him, "You can't do this, you can't go there, because you are a Negro." Nevertheless he had won a decisive victory over a man who had been won 43.7 percent.

    Los Angeles voters have had many opportunities to judge. Thomas Bradley had to form an opinion of him. The son of a poor farmer Texas, he joined the Los Angeles police force in 1940. During his twenty-one years on the police force he earned a law degree by attending school at night. He was elected to the city council years ago.

    At the time of the Los Angeles election, three other American cities already had black mayors, but none of these cities had as large a population as Los Angeles. Besides, the percentage of blacks in those other cities was much larger. Cleveland, Ohio, had thirty-six percent black when Carl Stokes was elected mayor of Cleveland in 1967. In the same year Richard Hatcher was elected mayor of Cary. In Newark, New Jersey, sixty percent of the population were black when Kenneth Gibson was elected in 1970. Thus election of a black mayor in those cities was not very surprising.

    In Los Angeles, thousands of white citizens voted for Thomas Bradley because they believed he would be a better mayor than the white candidate. Bradley had spent forty-eight of his fifty-five years in Los Angeles. Four years ago, Bradley lost mayoral election to Yorty. This time Bradley won.