Smart phones are so common these days. It's a wonder that our pets don't own one. But they don't necessarily have to. These four apps will help you take care of your best furry friend from dog training to first aid.

Pet First Aid

Price: $3.99

    Pet First Aid helps you provide the basic care and attention that your four-legged friend might need in a medical emergency. The application shows owners how to treat illnesses with helpful videos, pictures and articles on subjects like cuts, wound treatment and more. A section called Pet Info lets you enter in information about your pets including when they had their last vaccinations, any medicines they take, or information about any diseases or conditions your animal suffers from.

Paw Card Pet Tracker

Price: Free

    Paw Card helps you keep a record of your loved one's important information. Use it to record your pet's medical contacts, vaccinations, identity cards, medical conditions and medicines. Additional characteristics include a drawing showing your dog's weight over time.

Dog Park Finder

Price: Free

    Dog Park Finder helps you locate dog-friendly parks and training locations in your area(USA)locations only). The app includes in formation on more than 2,200 off-leash(无需给狗拴链的) areas, user photos and more than 6，500 reviews, so you can have fun with your dog off the leash.

Dog Book

Price: Free

    Dog Book is a social networking application for dogs. Like Face book, users can share with other people what's going on in their dog's life, share photos, and find great animal-friendly places to meet up.

    When I was in my fourth year of teaching, I was also (and am still) a high school track and field coach (田径教练). One year, I had a student, John, who entered my class when he was a junior.

    When I was in my fourth year of teaching, I was also (and am still) a high school track and field coach (田径教练). One year, I had a student, John, who entered my class when he was a junior. John changed to our school from Greece, and seemed to be interested in athletics, so I encouraged him to join our track team. I explained to him that even though he had never taken part in it before, I did believe that he could do well in any event, and I would be willing to coach him at whichever ones interested him. He accepted the offer, and began to work hard at every practice.

    About a month later, I had found out from other sources that John was a first-class tennis player, winning various junior awards in his home country. I went to him asking, “John, I really appreciate that you came out for the track team, but why didn't you play tennis instead? It seems that would interest you a lot more, since you're so good at it.” John answered, “Well, I like tennis, but you told me that you believed in me, and that you thought I could do well in track, so I wanted to try it for that reason.”

    From then on, I often remember my student's reply. I told it to a friend and she suggested I write it down to share somewhere with more teachers. No matter how critical (不满的) students can be of themselves, I've found that a simple “I trust that you can do it!” can go a long way!

    The haunting paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck, on show in the final leg of a travelling tour that has already attracted thousands of visitors in Hamburg and the Hague, may come as a surprise to many. Few outside the Nordic(北欧的) world would recognize the works of this Finnish artist who died in 1946. More people should. The 120 works have at their core 20 self-portraits, half the number she painted in all. The first, dated 1880, is of a wide-eyed teenager eager to absorb everything. The last is a sighting of the artist's ghost-to-be.

    Prematurely gifted, Schjerfbeck was 11 when she entered the Finnish Art Society's drawing school. “The Wounded Warrior in the Snow”, a history painting, was bought by a private collector and won her a state travel grant when she was 17. Schjerfbeck studied in Paris, went on to Pont-Aven, Brittany, where she painted for a year, then to Tuscany, Cornwall and St Petersburg. During her 1887 visit to St Ives, Cornwall, Schjerfbeck painted “The Convalescent”. A child wrapped in a blanket sits supported up in a large wicker(柳条编制的) chair, toying with a sprig(小枝条). The picture won a bronze medal at the 1889 Paris World Fair and was bought by the Finnish Art Society. To a modern eye it seems almost sentimental(感伤的) and is made up for only by the somewhat astonished, sad expression on the child's face, which may have been inspired by Schjerfbeck's early experiences. At four, she fell down a flight of steps and never fully recovered.

    In 1890, Schjerfbeck settled in Finland. Teaching exhausted her, she did not like the works of other local painters, and she was further isolated when she took on the care of her mother. “If I allow myself the freedom to live an isolated life”, she wrote, “then it is because it has to be that way.” In 1902, Schjerfbeck and her mother settled in the small, industrial town of Hyvinkaa, 50 kilometres north of Helsinki. Isolation had one desired effect for it was there that Schjerfbeck became a modern painter. She produced still lives and landscapes but above all moody yet sharp portraits of her mother, local school girls, women workers in town.

    “I have always searched for the dense depths of the soul, which have not yet been discovered by humans themselves”, she wrote, “where everything is still unconscious -- there one can make the greatest discoveries.” She experimented with different kinds of underpainting, scraped and rubbed, made bright rosy red spots; doing whatever had to be done to capture the subconscious — her own and that of her models. In 1913, Schjerfbeck was rediscovered by an art dealer and journalist, Gosta Stenman. Once again she was a success.

    Kieron Graham has known from a young age that he was adopted. While he loves his adoptive family, he has always wondered about his birth mother and brother. When his adoptive mom gave him a DNA test tool, they both hoped it might lead to his birth family. But neither guessed it would work so quickly, or that when it did, Graham would learn he and his long-lost brother may have crossed paths every day.

    It took just one week from the time Graham, a college student at Georgia's Kennesaw State University, received his DNA results on Ancestry.com for him to connect with his brother. Graham's DNA results showed that his closest match was a man named Vincent Ghant, and it turned out Ghant lived just a few minutes away.

Graham reached out and learned that the two were in fact long-lost brothers. Their mother, Shawn Ghant, made the difficult decision to place Kieron in adoptive care when he was just a baby. And she has worried and wondered about her youngest son ever since. Graham has since been reunited with his mother and both of his brothers on his mother's side.

    “It's all surreal(离奇的), too many emotions to describe exactly what I'm feeling about the entire situation, but it's a good situation,” Graham tells MNN.

    As fate would have it, Kieron and Vincent are both students at Kennesaw State. They even have the same major: political science. So it's a safe bet the two crossed paths many times over the past three years. And now, thanks to some DNA sleuthing(筛查), the two will cross paths many more times in the years to come.

    “We're getting together on Christmas with everyone, birth mother included,” Graham says. “That's sure to be a very indelible Christmas indeed, which will always be treasured by us.”

    The United States of America is mainly an English-speaking country. The majority of the population speak English as their native language. Besides, education, social activities, etc. are conducted in English. Across but for the most part, Americans speak one common language. This language is sometimes called American English.

    However, not everyone in the USA is a native speaker of English. Most immigrants (移民)are speakers of other languages. There are hundreds of communities around the USA where English is not the most commonly used languages. Chinese, Italian, German, Greek, Spanish and French are all spoken in various communities in the USA. Spanish is the second most commonly spoken language after English. It is widely spoken in New York and across the southern part of the country. For speakers of other languages, learning English is important, but teaching people to speak English as a second language was given little attention. Non-English speakers were expected to "pick up" the language by meeting with others in public. Recently, this has changed.

    Today, most large public schools and community colleges have ESL(English as a Second Language )programs; American English teachers feel that English students should learn the language the way they will use it. Therefore, ESL programs offer different English lessons to different students. Some programs teach students to communicate in English in public. Other programs teach the kind of English people who will need for their jobs. American ESL instructional methods do not lay emphasis on grammar or translation, but on the importance of communication. The goal is to get the English learners to learn by using the language.

    The World Health Organization recently said that it planned to add gaming disorder (游戏成瘾) to its new list of disease classifications, angering the gaming industry but pleasing doctors who hope it may make treatment more easily available.

    Some US experts said it would make little difference when it comes to helping people with the disorder, although others said it would bring attention to a disorder that people sometimes don't recognize. So some experts disagree WHO's plan.

    Many of us enjoy video games, but does playing our favorite game for a couple of hours every night mean we're suffering from gaming disorder? Not according to the WHO.

    The symptoms listed by the WHO include a lack of control over gaming, treating gaming more seriously than other life interests and daily activities, and continuing to play games despite the negative consequences that playing them might have.

    "The behavior pattern is enough to result in significant damage to one's personal, family, or social life." the WHO said.

    Meanwhile, Douglas Gentile of Iowa State University has carried out influential research into the cause of gaming addiction in young people." I and many others had assumed that gaming is not really a problem but is a symptom of other problems," he told NBC News. Many had thought it was simply a failure of self-control. To see if it was, Gentile's team studied a group of children who had been gaming for several years." We found that when kids became addicted, their anxiety increased … and their grades decreased," Gentile said. When kids were able to back off from gaming, their symptoms disappeared, he added.

    Gentile thinks medical organizations should pay attention to the WHO's proposal." This isn't an issue of opinion; it's an issue of science," he said." This is a major scientific and medical organization. They don't do things lightly and without reason."

    Dr Petros Levounis, chair of psychiatry at the New Jersey Medical School at Rutgers University, said that he hoped the WHO's proposal would lead to more research into obsessive (过度的) behavior among all types of people.

    "Now, there is renewed interest and excitement," he said. So some experts are in favour of WHO's plan.