Dear Mr. Rupp,

    The day I met you was the first day of high school. We liked each other immediately. You gave me a lot of advice over the next four years, like how I should get my ass to Berkeley where I belonged. I'm still there, by the way. I wish you were still around, too.

    I remember your laugh, which would start with a rough guffaw(狂笑) and end with a hacking smoker's cough that would make even the most rebellious (叛逆的) teenager decide to lay off the cigarettes. I remember the way you didn't lower your standards, yet still refused to give up on us. You were tough on us, and we were tough on you. Love is tough sometimes.

    The last time I wrote you a letter, it was 2005—four years after I graduated. I had just become a teacher, like you, and it had given me a new appreciation for the work you did with countless high school students over the years.

    It's hard to say what I'll miss the most about you. There are simply too many memories to sort through those four years, and it hurts to think you'll never read this letter. I want to believe that you knew how much you meant to your family, your students, your community, and your colleagues, but that would be a lot of realization to handle, even for you.

    You changed the lives of everyone around you. Even now, you are reminding me to cherish life and its brevity and beauty, and to tell the people I love how much they mean to me before it is too late.

    Dear teacher, dear mentor, and dear friend—I miss you and all that is about you. God bless you in Heaven.

To infinity and beyond,

Teresea

    If you have a chance to take a walk in a park, look carefully at the people walking their dogs. You'll probably find friendly-looking people with friendly dogs; quiet people with quiet dogs; large men with oversized dogs and long-haired women with long-eared dogs. As you've probably noticed, dogs and their owners look alike. Have you ever wondered why?

    These similarities are so common that researchers have tried to explain them. There are two theories (理论): the convergence (趋同) theory and the selection theory. The convergence theory says that as the owner and the dog spend more time together, they influence each other to the point where they grow similar. In other words, they “converge.” The selection theory, on the other hand, says that owners are interested in dogs that look like them, so they choose those dogs as pets.

    Recently, researchers at the University of California decided to test the two theories by taking pictures of 45 dogs separately from their owners. Then they asked some students to match the dogs' photos with their owners. The students were quite successful with purebred (纯种的) dogs: they correctly matched 16 out of 25 with their owners. However, they had almost no success connecting mixed-breed (杂交的) dogs with their owners. When owners select a purebred dog, they can easily predict (预测) what it will look like later. But that is not true with mixed-breed dogs because it's hard to predict what a mixed-breed dog will look like when it grows up. And since it was the purebreds not the mixed-breeds that looked like their owners, the research seems to prove the “selection theory”.

    But one bit of warning. Although many people look like their dogs, not all dog owners enjoy having the similarity pointed out to them. So, even if the similarity is amazing, don't go up to a stranger and say, “Wow, you look just like your dog!”

    Unlike most other holidays, the history of April Fools' Day, sometimes called All Fools' Day, is not totally clear. The only point in time that can be agreed on as the beginning of this tradition was 1582, in France. Before that year, the New Year was celebrated for eight days, beginning on March 25th. The celebration reached the highest point on April 1st. With the reform of the calendar under Charles IX，the Gregorian calendar(公历，阳历) was introduced, and New Year's Day was moved to January 1st.

    However, because in those days communications were not as developed as they are today, many people did not receive the news for several years. Some people refused to accept the new calendar and continued to celebrate the New Year on April 1st. These backward people were considered "fools" by other people. They  were often sent on "fools" errands(徒劳无益的工作)  or were made the targets of jokes.

    This developed, over time, into a tradition of playing a trick on someone on the first day of April. The tradition eventually spread to England and Scotland in the eighteenth century. It was later introduced to the American colonies of both the Britain and France. April Fools' Day thus developed into an international fun feast, so to speak, with different nationalities specializing in their own kind of humor at the expense of their friends and families.

    "Acting is the least mysterious of all crafts," Marion Brando once said. But for scientists, working out what is going on in an actor's head has always been something of a puzzle.

    Now, researchers have said actors show different patterns of brain activity depending on whether they are in character or not.

    Dr Steven Brown, from McMaster University in Canada, said, "It looks like when you are acting, you are suppressing (压制) yourself; almost like the character is possessing you."

    Brown and colleagues report how 15 actors, mainly theatre students, were trained to take on a Shakespeare role — either Romeo or Juliet — in a theatre workshop. They were then invited into the laboratory, where their brains were scanned in a series of experiments.

    Once inside the MRI scanner, the actors were asked to answer a number of questions, such as: would they go to the party? And would they tell their parents that they had fallen in love?

    Each actor was asked to respond to different questions, based on two different premises (前提). In one, they were asked for their own perspective, while in the other, they were asked to respond as though they were either Romeo or Juliet.

    The results revealed that the brain activity differed depending on the situation being tested. The team found that when the actors were in character, they use some third-person knowledge or inferences about their character.

    The team said they also found additional reduction in activity in two regions of the prefrontal cortex (前额皮质) linked to the sense of self, compared with when the actors were responding as themselves.

    However, Philip Davis, a professor at the University of Liverpool, was unimpressed by the research, saying acting is about far more than "pretending" to be someone — it involves embodying (体现) the text and language.

    A study published in the journal Science reveals that since 1970, bird populations in the United States and Canada have declined by 29 percent, or almost 3 billion birds. The results show tremendous losses across diverse groups of birds and habitats - from iconic songsters such as meadowlarks to long-distance migrants such as swallows.

    "These data are consistent with what we're seeing elsewhere," said coauthor Peter Marra, former head of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center. It's urgent to address ongoing threats, both because the domino effects (多米诺效应)can lead to the decay of ecosystems that humans depend on for our own health and livelihoods and because people all over the world cherish birds in their own right. Can you imagine a world without birdsong?"

    Evidence for the declines emerged from detection of migratory birds in the air from 143 NEXRAD weather radar stations across the continent in a period spanning over 10 years as well as from nearly 50 years of data collected through multiple monitoring efforts on the ground. Citizen-science participants also contributed a lot, for the analysis included citizen-science data from the North American Breeding Bird Survey coordinated by the Canadian Wildlife Service- the main sources of long-term, large-scale population data for North American birds.

    The study noted that the largest factor driving these declines is likely the widespread loss and degradation of habitat, especially due to agricultural intensification and urbanization. Other studies have documented death from predation (捕食)by domestic cats; collisions with glass, buildings, and other structures; and pervasive (普遍的)use of pesticides associated with widespread declines in insects, an essential food source for birds. Climate change is expected to compound these challenges by altering habitats and threatening plant communities that birds need to survive.

    "It's a wake-up call that we've lost more than a quarter of our birds in the U.S. and Canada," said coauthor Adam Smith from Environment and Climate Change Canada. But the crisis reaches far beyond our individual borders. Many of the birds that breed in Canadian backyards migrate through or spend the winter in the U.S. and places farther south - from Mexico and the Caribbean to Central and South America. What our birds need now is an historic, hemispheric effort that unites people and organizations with one common goal: bringing our birds back.