BEIJING—Lu Na thinks that the 4,000 yuan ($630) she spent in traveling to the Republic of Korea(ROK) was worth every penny.

    “Apart from the exotic outfits and tasty kimchi, I really appreciated local people's friendliness and the convenient language environment there,” said the 27-year-old woman, who traveled to the country in October 2011 and came back with bags of fashionable dresses and cosmetics.

    “We have provided many services to Chinese visitors, including free transport cards, handbooks for individual tourists, and more liberal visa policies.”

    “We believe that no country can compare with the ROK in providing services for individual Chinese travelers,” said Zhu Linlin, media manager of the Korea Tourism Organization's Beijing branch.

    Favorable visa policies contribute to the popularity of the ROK as a destination for Chinese tourists. Only a passport and an ID card are needed for a Chinese citizen to get a visa to the ROK.

    However, some suggest that ROK hotels should provide special dining rooms for Chinese customers due to different eating habits. “ROK people often cross their legs when they have meals, but for most Chinese people, especially those who are elderly or fat, it's very hard for them to sit cross-legged without feeling numb.”

    In 1998, China granted the ROK approved destination status, which allowed Chinese citizens to travel to the country in tour groups.

    According to statistics from China Tourism Academy, the number of Chinese tourists visiting the ROK reached more than 2 million by the end of October 2011, up 19. 9 percent compared with that of the same period last year. China recently became the Republic of Korea's main source of foreign tourists in both number and spending.

    Feifei, an 11-year-old boy from Xuzhou, Jiangsu Province, suffered from a sudden acute eye disease which has almost led to blindness. The disease was caused when he overused his eyes during the winter vacation, during which he played computer games for continuous 10 days and nights.

    Many youngsters in China nowadays are increasingly addicted to computer games and other electronic products. This is followed by a series of health problems, with the most typical case being myopia, or nearsightedness.

    According to the latest research report released by the World Health Organization (WHO),the myopia rate among Chinese teenagers ranks first in the world—70 percent of high school and college students. The rate is nearly 40 percent in primary school students, while it is only 10 percent for their peers in the United States.

    There are at least 10 million people in China with severe myopia, and they are likely to get pathological myopia（病理性的近视） in middle age. Pathological myopia can't be treated with glasses or surgery, and it is one of the biggest factors that lead to blindness, Xu Xun, an expert at Shanghai General Hospital, pointed out.

    Experts explain that two major factors lead to the high rate of myopia among Chinese people. One is high academic pressure, and the other one is excessive use of electronic devices over a long period of time. Genetics, on the other hand, are not the main reason, as only 20 percent of Chinese people had myopia in the 1960s.

    "Teenagers are now faced with severe academic pressure, which means they often study without natural light. This increases their risk of becoming nearsighted," Xu said. Experts suggest that youngsters maintain a proper balance between study and rest so as to protect their eyesight, and parents should play an active role in the process.

    "When your mother scolds you, you can look elsewhere and think about other things. Just ignore her words. But remember: such a tough attitude cannot be used often." These words are from a series of cartoons which outline skills for children to fight against their mothers. The images have created heated debate among Chinese netizens（网民）.

    Regarded as "a book for children aged 6 to 12 who are always scolded by their parents"， the cartoons, drawn by two 10-year-old Beijing girls, list over 20 skills which children can use to deal with their mothers' anger such as crying, pretending to be ashamed, fleeing into the toilet and pleasing her afterwards. Each skill is described with vivid pictures and humorous notes. The creativity of the young girls has amazed netizens, the Yangtse Evening Post reported on Thursday.

    According to one of the girls' mothers, her daughter once received a poor mark in an exam, and the mother blamed her and compared her performance with another classmate. The daughter's feelings led to her creating the cartoons. The girl's father, who first posted the pictures on his Sohu Microblog on Monday, said he hopes parents pay close attention to the pictures, allow children to feel free to develop their own characteristics and try not to criticize them so often.

    "The cartoons, although an individual case, reflect a modern phenomenon and some of the problems within Chinese family education," said Yu Qinfang, an expert on family education. According to a survey of 104 children and their parents, Yu discovered that as many as 51.9 percent of primary school students hate being urged to do things by their mothers. "Not giving children enough time and hurrying them to do things seems to be a very tiny detail within family life, but it is potentially a huge problem which can easily be ignored by parents. A mother's blame may lead to negative feelings within her child's heart," Yu said. "Parents should learn to blame less and be more patient."

    I'll admit I've never quite understood the obsession (难以破除的成见) surrounding genetically modified (GM) (改变) crops. To environmentalist opponents, GM foods are simply evil, an understudied, possibly harmful tool used by big agricultural businesses to control global seed markets and beat local farmers. They argue that GM foods have never delivered on their supposed promise, that money spent on GM crops would be better channeled to organic farming and that consumers should be protected with warning labels on any products that contain genetically modified ingredients. To supporters, GM crops are a key part of the effort to sustainably provide food to meet a growing global population. But more than that, supporters see the GM opposition of many environmentalists as fundamentally anti-science, no different than those who question the basics of man-made climate change.

    For both sides, GM foods seem to act as a symbol: you're pro-agricultural business or anti-science. But science is exactly what we need more of when it comes to GM foods, which is why I was happy to see Nature devote a special series of articles to the GM food controversy. The conclusion: while GM crops haven't yet realized their initial promise and have been dominated by agricultural businesses, there is reason to continue to use and develop them to help meet the enormous challenge of sustainably feeding a growing planet.

    That doesn't mean GM crops are perfect, or a one-size-fits-all solution to global agriculture problems. But anything that can increase farming efficiency—the amount of crops we can produce per acre of land—will be extremely useful.GM crops can and almost certainly will be part of that suite of tools, but so will traditional plant breeding, improved soil and crop management—and perhaps most important of all, better storage and transport infrastructure (基础设施) especially in the developing world.(It doesn't do much good for farmers in places like sub-Saharan Africa to produce more food if they can't get it to hungry consumers.) I'd like to see more non-industry research done on GM crops—not just because we'd worry less about prejudice, but also because seed companies like Monsanto and Pioneer shouldn't be the only entities (实体) working to harness genetic modification. I'd like to see GM research on less commercial crops, like corn. I don't think it's vital to label GM ingredients in food, but I also wouldn't be against it—and industry would be smart to go along with labeling, just as a way of removing fears about the technology.

    Most of all, though, I wish a tenth of the energy that's spent endlessly debating GM crops was focused on those more pressing challenges for global agriculture. There are much bigger battles to fight.

    It's common knowledge that the woman in Leonardo da Vinci's most famous painting seems to look back at observers, following them with her eyes no matter where they stand in the room. But this common knowledge turns out wrong.

    A new study finds that the woman in the painting is actually looking out at an angle that's 15.4 degrees off to the observer's right­well outside of the range that people normally believe when they think someone is looking right at them. In other words, said the study author, Horstmann, "She's not looking at you." This is somewhat ironic, because the entire phenomenon of a person's gaze (凝视) in a photograph or painting seeming to follow the viewer is called the "Mona Lisa effect" . That effect is absolutely real, Horstmann said. If a person is illustrated or photographed looking straight ahead, even people viewing the portrait from an angle will feel they are being looked at. As long as the angle of the person's gaze is no more than about 5 degrees off to either side, the Mona Lisa effect occurs.

    This is important for human interaction with on-screen characters. If you want someone off to the right side of a room to feel that a person on-screen is looking at him or her, you don't cut the gaze of the character to that side­surprisingly, doing so would make an observer feel like the character isn't looking at anyone in the room at all. Instead, you keep the gaze straight ahead.

    Horstmann and his co-author were studying this effect for its application in the creation of artificial-intelligence avatars(虚拟头像) when Horstmann took a long look at the "Mona Lisa" and realized she wasn't looking at him.

    To make sure it wasn't just him, the researchers asked 24 people to view images of the "Mona Lisa" on a computer screen. They set a ruler between the viewer and the screen and asked the participants to note which number on the ruler intersected Mona Lisa's gaze. To calculate the angle of Mona Lisa's gaze as she looked at the viewer, they moved the ruler farther from or closer to the screen during the study. Consistently, the researchers found, participants judged that the woman in the "Mona Lisa" portrait was not looking straight at them, but slightly off to their right.

    So why do people repeat the belief that her eyes seem to follow the viewer? Horstmann isn't sure. It's possible, he said, that people have the desire to be looked at, so they think the woman is looking straight at them. Or maybe the people who first coined the term "Mona Lisa effect" just thought it was a cool name.

    Today the Nobel Prize in Literature awarded journalist Svetlana Alexievich approximately $970,000 in recognition of a lifetime of excellence. The 67-year-old author of Voices From Chernobyl and War's Unwomanly Face was praised by the Swedish Academy "for her polyphonic(复调式的) writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time."

    Prizes like the Nobel inspire much expectations before the announcement. People give their best guesses as to who will win, look back on past winners, and even place bets as if spectators at a Derby(赛马会).

    Literary prizes reward artistic brilliance. They help writers earn a decent living. But is the public's fascination with prize-winning authors healthy? Our impulse seems to increasingly contribute to a culture of turning authors into celebrities, where readers follow the author instead of the book.

    A story should stand on its own, as a considered, complete book, without biographical information from author. It's an idea perhaps best conveyed in Roland Barthes's 1968 essay The Death of the Author. "The image of literature to be found in contemporary culture is arbitrarily centered on the author, his person, his history, his tastes, his passions."

    Nearly 50 years later, a few still agree. "I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors," New York Times bestselling author Elena Ferrante once wrote. "If books have something to say, they will sooner or later find readers; if not, they won't, "she continued. "True miracles are the ones whose makers will never be known."

    ①But the rules for submission for the Man Booker International Prize, for example, strongly encourage authors to "make themselves available for publicity". And the foundation behind the National Book Award requires finalists to participate in their "website-related publicity".

    ② In 2007, a reporter who showed up uninvited at Doris Lessing's house was the first to inform her that she had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Today the Twitterati came knocking on Alexievich's digital door hour before the award was even official. To be considered for a prize is to be a public figure.

    ③ Harry Potter series author J. K. Rowling, with over 5.6 million Twitter followers, has actively addressed readers through public appearances and social media, revealing much more than we could have imagined when we closed the final Harry Potter book. We now know the house Harry's children will be sorted into, that Dumbledore is gay," Voldemort" is actually pronounced with a silent "t", and a whole host of the other minor and major details about the backstory of the characters.

    The magical world Rowling created in her books—a relatively tight mystery with well-laid clues that led to a satisfying conclusion, which had to prove their merits to the reader based on an internal logic—is being unraveled by her own hand.

    ④ Of course, public attention also has very important benefits for authors. For three months after receiving the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in fiction, Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad sold about triple its print sales from before the prize, Publishers Weekly reports. On Oct. 5, 2010, in the first FT/Oppenheimer Funds Emerging Voices Awards, as Nigerian-born Chigozie Obioma accepted the prize for fiction with an easy smile, his excitement was appreciable. Given the cash prize of $40,000 for each winner, it's hard to downplay the importance of such an honor. Such awards bring necessary visibility and funding to writers facing a literary landscape dominated by white men.

    But our culture of celebrity is often too wrapped up in the way we read: How might the meaning of a work change if the author really didn't grow up in a poor neighborhood, or if he or she was abused in childhood? Readers studied the author's life as if it were the key to interpreting his or her novels.

    Behind our fascination is the question that drives all such questions: What did the author intend? By all means, let us praise brilliant work and in doing so trust that the author has already told us enough, and that the story he or she meant to tell ended with the final page.