We are surrounded by mixed messages about mistakes: we're told we earn by making them, but we work hard to avoid them. So the result is that most of us know that we are going to make mistakes, but deep down, we feel we shouldn't.

    Experiments with schoolchildren who did well on a given test show that those who were praised for being smart and then offered a more challenging or less challenging task afterward usually chose the easier one. On the other hand, children praised for trying hard-rather than being smart-far more often selected the more difficult task.

    If we try hard to avoid mistakes, we aren't open to getting the information we need in order to do better. In a writing study, experiments showed that those who are so scared to make mistakes perform worse in writing tasks than those who aren't as worried about being perfect. They fear receiving any kind of negative feedback, so they don't learn where they went wrong and how to get better.

    We don't just learn more when we're open to mistakes, we learn deeper. Research tells us that if we're only concerned about getting the right answer, we don't always learn the underlying concepts that help us truly understand whatever we're trying to figure out. Mistakes

need to be seen not as a failure to learn, but as a guide to what still needs to be learned. As Thomas Edison said, “I am not discouraged, because every abandoned wrong attempt is another step forward. "

    Furthermore, we often make mistakes because we try new things-we wander away from accepted paths. Teflon, penicillin-these are examples of great discoveries made by mistake. Take a page from Albert Einstein, who said, "Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new. "

    We've heard of robots and AI（Artificial Intelligence）taking human jobs, but I bet mayors（市长）don't really think their jobs can be threatened any time soon. They were wrong, and the AI running for the mayor of a Tokyo district was clear proof of that.

    AI can't legally nm for high-ranking public management positions yet, but one mayoral candidate from Tama City, Tokyo, intended to maximize the use of artificial intelligence in running city affairs. He was running his campaign （竞选运动） as "AI Mayor". Basically, he was suggesting replacing human public officials with AI and having them collect city data and create fair and balanced policies that will benefit everyone.

    "For the first time in the world, AI will run in an election," human candidate Michihito Matsuda announced on Twitter. "Artificial Intelligence will change Toma City. With the birth of an AI Mayor, we will conduct balanced politics."

    The AI Mayor was campaigning very much like its human competitors. Posters were shown all over Tama City and campaign trucks were blaring out（大声鸣响）promises of an AI utopia （乌托邦）and asking for support.

    Some people called Michihito Matsuda's campaign a stunt （噱头）, as a human would still be the one legally in charge. However, others said that they were excited about the future of AI running things in the background, adding that it had to be a better choice.

    If 62 is the number in red on the top of your math test, for most of us, it's a total disaster. Your entire week is ruined, and 62 is what races through your head for the rest of the day. If 9 is the number of likes on that cute photo you posted the other day, many will feel rather disappointed.

    Our lives have become a constant system of ranks, assessments, and numbers. The days of passing judgment on others based on personality are gone, and now we judge based on how good a person's numbers are. We compare ourselves to the numbers of others, such as how low another person's weight is how high their paycheck. Self-worth is no longer based on quality of character, but quantity of numbers.

    In today's social media consumed society, it has never been easier for people to broadcast their numbers to the world. A simple click of a button can take you to a page where you can observe the number of friends or followers a person has. Teenagers have taken on this mentality that if you don't have a certain number of followers, then you aren't "cool". Many feel they are not important if very few people are witnessing their status updates. This state of mind is harmful and not at all accurate. Twitter and Facebook can let the world witness your updates, but they will never let anyone see who you really are. In the end, self-worth should be based on what you think of yourself, not what the world thinks of you.

    So next time you receive a failing grade or you lose a follower, remember that these things cannot and should not define (定义) you. You are not your numbers. You are a person-a3-D living and breathing person with ideas and creativity and love that the rigidity of numbers cannot represent. You are the things you love and the things you laugh at and the way you treat others.

    Owen Williams and his wife befriended their eighty-year-old neighbor, Ken Watson, when they moved into their home in Wales three years ago. When their daughter, Cadi, was born a year later, Watson became a grandfather figure, taking the time to drop off Christmas presents for the child. Watson died in October.

    On Monday, Watson's daughter stopped by the Williams home with a large bag containing 14 wrapped Christmas presents her father had bought and wrapped for Cadi.

    Williams posted notes about what happened on Twitter to spread some Christmas spirit. He wrote that he wasn't sure whether he should give his daughter all the presents now, or hold onto them and give her one a year. Twitter responded in a big way, with many saying the story brought them to tears. So many people weighed in about the gifts, in fact, that Williams made a Twitter poll. So far, more than 55, 000 people have voted on how he should distribute the gifts.

    Williams, who is a social-media consultant, said the majority of people are voting for giving Cadi one present a year. He said he has no idea what is in the packages, but he's leaning toward listening to the will of the voters. "I think we're going to turn it into a Christmas story for our daughter," he said. "We'll do one a year for the next 14 years. It feels like the right thing to do now. If she opens a box of Lego when she's 16 then so be it."

    He said he was struck by how many people have responded by saying their neighbors are virtual strangers to them. "The thing that stands out to me is how few people know their neighbors," Williams said. "People are saying, 'That's so lovely. I don't even know my neighbors.' … This Christmas, take your neighbors a bottle of wine or a small gift, a token. Just say, 'Hi.' You can open a new world like we did."

    Many of us think, wrongly, that the moon doesn't change. For example, the Tang Dynasty poet Zhang Ruoxu once wrote that "Generations have come and passed away; From year to year the moons took alike, old and new."

    However, a new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience shows that the moon is in fact slowly shrinking over time. For the study, a group of US scientists examined and analyzed thousands of photographs taken by the NASA orbiter Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (月球勘测轨道飞行器照相机) . They found that there were lots of faults (断层) on the surface of the moon. These faults were formed by recent movement on the moon.

    According to NASA, the moon is made up of pieces of rocks with a hot core (核) .The moon continued to expand as it was born. But in this process, it released energy and cooled down. Then it began to shrink, in a way comparable to the shrinking of a grape into a raisin (葡萄干) . Over the past several hundred million years, it has become 46 meters "skinnier". But due to its hard and rocky crust (外壳) . the moon's surface continues to push up, "Some of these quakes can be fairly strong around five on the Richter scale (里氏震级) ," said Thomas Watters, a senior scientist at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in the US.

    But does that mean the moon is a dangerous place that human shouldn't try to explore and live on in the future? Maybe not, reported the Telegraph, "This isn't anything to worry about. The moon may be shrinking, but not by much. It's not going anywhere," Watters comforted us.

    The new discovery proves that the idea that the moon is a dead, boring place is wrong. "We have been to the moon and we've done some great science, but there is still a lot we don't know. The moon is shrinking ­ we didn't really realize that until recently. It's a much more active and interesting place than we thought and we should explore that," NASA scientist Nathan Williams said.

    A study based on data gathered by a NASA sensor has revealed China and India, the world's two most populous countries, are primarily responsible for making the Earth greener over the past two decades.

    The study, published on Feb 11 in the journal Natural Sustainability, has found that since 2000 the Earth's green leaf area has increased by over 5 million square kilometers. That's an area equivalent to the total of the Amazon rainforests. "China and India account for one-third of the greening, considering the general idea of land degradation (退化) in populous countries from overexploitation," said Chen Chi from Boston University, lead author of the study.

    The effect mainly comes from ambitious tree-planting programs in China and intensive agriculture in both countries, NASA said in a statement. China is the source of a quarter of the planet's increase in forest area, despite having only 6.6 percent of the world's vegetated (固定植被的)area, according to the study. Forest conservation and expansion programs account for 42 percent of the increase, and another 32 percent come from intensive agriculture of food crops, NASA said. While raising their green leaf areas, China and India have also greatly increased their food production through" multiple cropping" practices, where a field is replanted and crops are harvested several time each year. "Production of grains, vegetable, fruits and more have increased by about 35 to 40 percent since 2000 to feed their large population," NASA said.

    Over the past decades, China has made great efforts to green the land. In 1978, the central government launched a national-level forestation project-the Three North Shelterbelt Forest Program. By the end of 2017, the forest coverage rate among the regions in the project reached 13.57 percent, compared to 5.05 percent 40 years ago. In a greening project, Kubuqi Desert, seventh largest in the country, has seen one-third of its area covered by vegetation during the past three decades thanks to forestation efforts.