Have you ever wanted to travel back in time? What about traveling into the future? There's an easy way to do it. One way you can make a time travel journey is by writing a letter to your future self to be opened in the future. To your future self, the letter will be a visit from the past. 

    What can be gained by writing a letter to yourself? Depends on how good your letter is. You have the chance to say something to your future self. What would you want to say? You'll be able to talk to yourself 5,10,15 years down the road. There may be instructions for your future self, or you may have goals that you will want to reach.

    There are a lot of things you could include in your letter or letters to yourself. The more you include, the better the letter will be to you. Be creative with what you put in your letter. Include a picture of yourself or family to show the period from which the letter came.

    You can store your letter in many different ways. You can give your letter to a friend or family member to keep and mail to you. If you can get others to take part, have them write letters to themselves as well and ask someone to be the letter holder until it's time to send the letters. You can also use a service online to store your letter and e-mail it to you. Ready to write to yourself two and a half years down the road?

    Letters as a way of communication have long given way to phone calls and WeChat messages.

    But a TV show, Letters Alive, is helping bring this old way to keep in touch back into the present.

    Letters Alive took its idea from a UK program with a similar name, Letters Live, which was first shown in 2013. Both shows feature famous actors and actresses, but there is no gossip , no eye-catching visual effects or any regular showbiz (演艺圈) activities. Instead, it's just one person walking up to a microphone and reading a letter.

    But these are not just any letters. They are selected from a wide time span and a diverse range of subjects. There is, for example, a passionate letter that famous painter Huang Yongyu wrote to playwright Cao Yu 30 years ago to criticize his lack of creativity. There is also a heartfelt note from Spring and Autumn Period written by two ordinary young soldiers to their elder brother to report their lives in the war zone.

    Every letter is like a small piece of history. By hearing them being read, it's as if we are being sent back in time to experience a moment that we would otherwise never have had the chance to.

    “Letters Live makes us pause and imagine the lives behind the letters,” UK actor Benedict Cumberbatch, one of the readers on the UK show, told The Guardian. “It allows people from all ages and all walks of life to experience a moment of time in someone else's life for a brief moment.”

    Compared to published texts, letters also come with a personal touch.

    One example from Letters Live was a note of thanks from the mother of a dying child to JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books. It read: “Mrs Rowling, Cancer threatened to take everything from my daughter, and your books turned out to be the castle we so desperately needed to hide in.”

    According to Guan Zhengwen, the director of Letters Alive, it is this kind of humanity behind every letter that strikes a chord (引发共鸣) with the audience. It is also what made the show a big hit in China ever since its first episode aired on Dec 5.

    “It's a thing of the past that entertainment shows establish themselves only with pretty faces,” Guan told Sohu News. “Showbiz is starting to switch to a focus on wisdom and intelligence.

    Here is a record of the discussion about AI (artificial intelligence) conducted by several scientists.

    Scientist A: I would say that we are quite a long way off developing the AI, though I do think it will happen within the next thirty or forty years. We will probably remain in control of technology and it will help us solve many of the world's problems. However, no one really knows what will happen if machines become more intelligent than humans. They may help us, ignore us or destroy us. I tend to believe AI will have a positive influence on our future lives, but whether that is true will be partly up to us.

    Scientists B: I have to admit that the potential consequences of creating something that can match or go beyond human intelligence frighten me. Even now, scientists are teaching computers how to learn on their own. At some point in the near future, their intelligence may well take off and develop at an ever-increasing speed. Human beings evolve biologically very slowly and we could be quickly substituted. In the short term, there is the danger that robots will take over millions of human jobs, creating a large underclass of unemployed people. This could mean large-scale poverty and social unrest. In the long term machines might decide the world would be better without humans.

    Scientists C: I'm a member of the campaign to Stop Killer Robots. Forget the movie image of a terrifying Terminator stamping on human skulls and think of what's happening right now: military machines like drones, gun turrets and sentry robots are already being used to kill with very little human input. The next step will be autonomous “murderbots” following orders but finally deciding who to kill on their own. It seems clear to me that this would be extremely dangerous for humans. We need to be very cautious indeed about what we ask machines to do.

Save the Animals

    Animals are natural resources(资源）that people have wasted all through our history.

    Animals have been killed for their fur and feathers(羽毛), for food, for sport, and simply because they were in the way. Thousands of kinds of animals have disappeared from the earth forever. Hundreds more are on the danger list today. About 170 kinds in the United States alone are considered in danger.

    Why should people care? Because we need animals. And because once they are gone, there will never be any more. Animals are more than just beautiful or interesting. They are more than just a source of food. Every animal has its place in the balance(平衡)of nature. Destroying one kind of animal can create many problems.

    For example, when farmers killed large numbers of hawks(鹰), the farmers stores of com and rain were destroyed by rats and mic. Why? Because of hawks ate rats and mice that multiplied(繁殖)quickly

    Luckily, some people are working to help save the animals. Some groups raise money to let people know about the problem .And they try to get the governments to pass laws protecting animals in danger.

    Quite a few countries have passed laws. These laws forbid(禁止)the killing of any animals or plants on the danger list. Slowly, the number of some animals in danger is growing

    Feeding a crowd of hundreds doesn't make Kenny Seals-Nutt nervous.

    In fact, he loves being in the kitchen.

    By the time Kenny, 16, reached his third year of high school in Charlotte, US, he had become vice president of his school's cooking club.

    Kenny said he developed his love of cooking by watching his grandmother, who owned a business.

    And at the age of 5, he cooked his first dish. Taking it to school for lunch, he warmed it up in the school's microwave, while the other kids ate their sandwiches.

    "I love to eat, and it started to become more fun to cook than to have food prepared for me," he said.

    Cooking came easy to Kenny, and he enjoyed adding new ingredients (原料) into common dishes. "It started with a passion (热情) and I wanted to know more," he said.

    Last summer, Kenny put his skills to the test by working with his grandmother to cater his uncle's wedding. Kenny added new changes to the traditional (传统的) dishes that his grandma had prepared.

    Chef Frederick Mookie Hicks, owner of a catering business, said Kenny's success comes from his ability (能力) to multitask (多任务) in the kitchen.

    "He's so enthusiastic (热情的) about cooking that he doesn't let anything stop him," Hicks said.

    When we see a person in trouble, the first idea that comes to our mind is to lend a hand. But what if we see an animal in trouble, does the same rule apply?

    This question was raised after a group of penguins were saved from an icy gully（峡谷）in Antarctica. It was filmed for the BBC wildlife series Dynasties. The film crew were anxious when they saw that a group of penguins had fallen into a gully and been trapped with their young. They built a slope（斜坡）so that a few of the penguins could save themselves.

    The case has taken the international media by storm. Viewers watching this film let out a sigh of relief. "I'm so glad. I understand not taking action directly, but a helping hand isn't bothering, right?" viewer Kathryn Shaw said on her Facebook.

    However, others think human interference（干涉） is unnatural. "You can't have sunshine throughout your life. To have done anything else would only make matters worse," said the show's creator David Attenborough, according to The Times.

    In this case, however, Mike Gunton, the executive producer of the series, said that this was a one­off situation. "There were no animals going to suffer by interfering. You weren't touching the animals and it was just felt by doing this... they had the chance not to have to keep slipping down the slope," he told the BBC.

    Such cases are familiar to Paul Nicklen, wildlife photographer for National Geographic. He told Metro, "If it's ever a predator（捕食者）situation, no matter how gut­wrenching, you stay out of the way. Even when you're watching a male polar bear eat a baby bear."

    "There's no rule book in those situations. You can only respond to the facts that are right there in front of you," Will Lawson, the show's director, told Daily Mail.