Gregory Talley used to sleep in a park or under a bridge. The 50-year-old has been homeless for more than 10 years.

    “It is hard. It's hard to live homeless. You filled every day trying to find cut where you are going to get something to eat. If I hadn't found wonderful Fairfax County Kennedy Shelter, I wouldn't know where I would be by now. I might be dead,” Talley said.

    The Kennedy Shelter is one of the facilities New Hope Housing provides for homeless people.

    Pam Micheli has devoted her life to making the lives of this vulnerable（易受伤的）population better as executive director of the non-profit organization.

    “I went to Africa in 1985. And I saw a huge amount of poverty, but I saw so much hope. And I decided that I should try to do something that would bring hope to people,” Michell said.

    When Michell began working with New Hope Housing 25 years ago, its three shelters had about 80 beds. Now, it has 350 beds and serves about 1,500 homeless people every year. She has expanded the program beyond just providing beds for the night.

    “We do outreach（拓展）, we do prevention, we do permanent housing. We do transitional housing. We have an education program with all sorts of different things to move people to end their homelessness,” she said, “Our Out of Poverty program is not just about money. It's about you could be spiritually poor, you could be relationship poor ... you could be educationally poor. So it is focusing on how you get out of this poverty that has brought you to being homeless. The program tries to teach the shelter residents self-reliance（自立）and work values, and includes courses on planning and personal responsibility.

    “I learned I still have opportunities to change it and I can change it,” said shelter resident Lewis Webster. “It is just about going forth in doing necessary work to do it. I mean if you really want better, you would do better and that's the frame of mind of me now.”

    Ben Lecomte, a French long-distance swimmer, dropped into the water Tuesday at Choshi, Japan, and embarked on his attempt to become the first person to swim across the Pacific Ocean, BBC News reports.

    Six years in the planning, the 5,500-mile effort is expected to take five to six months, with Lecomte swimming eight hours a day and covering an average of 30 miles daily, according to his website.

    His route to San Francisco will take him through the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an area three times the size of France where large amounts of garbage and plastic waste have collected, CNN reports.

    Lecomte will be accompanied by a specially outfitted support boat named Discoverer. He will take rest periods on the boat, but it will return him to his stopping point each day to make sure he swims the entire distance.

    In addition to accomplishing a first, Lecomte said, he wants to draw attention to the problems of ocean pollution and climate change. A team of scientists plan to conduct research for 12 scientific institutions, including NASA and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, while he is making his swim.

    Lecomte is no stranger to feats of long-distance open-water swimming. In 1998, he swam 4,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean. On that swim he encountered sharks and stingrays. This time, he said, he will be wearing a shark-repellent bracelet.

    One of the challenges will be making sure he has enough energy each day, and Lecomte said he intends to consume 8,000 calories daily.

    When you're on the go, your best friend and resource can be your phone. In the age of smart phones, apps are like guiding stars: They can point you in the right direction for a hotel, list expenses, send postcards, and much more. When used together, these apps can be the basic travel tool, placing a wealth of information at your fingertips no matter where you are on the planet. U.S. NewsTravel has picked the essential travel apps, known for their utility and reliability. Best of all, they cost absolutely nothing.

Trip It

    Your Personal Travel Agent

    Be your own travel agent and plan every detail of your trip—from car rental to accommodating restaurants—with Trip It. You can make travel schedule by hand, or simply forward the email confirmations of your flight, rental car, train tickets, and hotels to plans.

Weather Free

    Your Go-To Meteorologist(气象学者)

    Stop trying to explain the weather forecast on the evening news (particularly when it's in a foreign language). The Weather Free app informs you (in English) of the climate in various locations. It features the local weather, and other key factors that will inform your decision about what to wear before stepping outside.

Goby

    Your Event Guru

    When you're in a foreign city, you sometimes look around and ask: Where are all the people? Goby has the answer. This app pinpoints the neighborhood hot spots (including museums, hotels, eateries, and more) in your neighborhood. But its true value comes in finding nearby events. You'll discover concerts, plays, and more right around the corner.

    A 12 -year-old girl who had a feeling that she might be quite clever has taken a test and proved she was absolutely right.

    After raising the idea with her parents and pestering (纠缠)them for the best part of a year, Lydia took the test in her summer holidays. It turns out the test wasn't that hard after all.

    "I was really nervous before the test and I thought it was going to be really hard. But as I started the test, I thought it was a bit easier than I thought it was going to be," she said.

    Lydia Sebastian achieved the top score of 162 on Mensa's Cattell III B paper, showing she has a higher IQ than well-known geniuses Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking. The comparison doesn't sit well with the British student, who's currently in Year 8 at a selective girl's grammar school in Essex, England.

    "I don't think I can be compared to such great intellectuals as Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking. They've achieved so much. I don't think it's right," Lydia told CNN.

To explain Lydia's mark's level, the top adult score in the Cattell III B test, which mainly tests verbal(语言) reasoning, is 161. A top 2% score—which allows entry to Mensa, the club for those with high IQs—would be 148 or over. Lydia scored 162, placing her in the top 1% of the population.

    Lydia's not quite sure what she wants to do when she leaves school, although she's leaning toward something "based around Maths, because it's one of my favorite subjects." "All I'm going to do is work as hard as I can, and see where that gets me," she said.

    A so-called “smart drug” intended to improve people's cognitive (认知的) function to protect the brain from altitude sickness.

    Visiting high-altitude sites for work, spot, religious pilgrimages and military can result in cognitive effects, including memory loss and attention difficulties. There's little you can do to prevent these symptoms except acclimatize -but this takes time and doesn't always work. A drug called oxiracetam might be the answer.

    ShengLi Hu at the Third Military Medical University, Chongqing, China and her colleagues studied the performance of male military personnel at altitude. All lived in towns around 1,800 meters above sea level, During the study, they spent eight days at this altitude and then climbed for three days to reach 4,000 meters, where they stayed for up to a month.

    Twenty participants took oxriacetam three times a day for the first 15 days of the study, while another 20 received no intervention. The man did tests of attention and memory at the start and end of the study and 20 days in, by which time they had been at 4,000 meters for nine days.

    While all the participants experienced a drop in cognitive ability at 4,00 meters, those who took oxiracetam showed a much smaller drop than the control group.

    The team found that at high altitude the brain stem, which plays a critical role in supporting basic living functions, received blood at the expense of areas responsible for more advanced cognitive functions. But in people who took oxiracetam, blood flowing throughout the brain rose, thus offering more oxygen to these areas. This may be how the drug seems to lessen cognitive problems like with low oxygen.

    It isn't yet known whether diverting blood in this way could have negative effects in the long run. "The results are striking and imply that oxiracetam may be beneficial for helping to relieve cognitive ability decline caused by altitude." says Timothy Hales at the University of Dundee, UK.

    San Francisco is a great city. Below are some ideas for educational activities and programs in San Francisco for this summer.

    The San Francisco School: Summer Programs

    There are summer camps for the children from pre-kindergarten through middle school at the San Francisco School. With programs such as "Fearless Writing" "A Green World" and "Re-Making Clothing", San Francisco becomes a great place for children to learn and have fun in the summer. Registration starts in the spring. Call 415-749-4550 to know more.

    San Francisco Art Institute: Community Education

    From children to elders, all people are welcome to sign up for all sorts of art classes all year round, such as "Adult Continuing Education", "Pre-college Programs" and "A Young Artist". Check online for schedules, class types, age groups and more or call 415-749-4500.

    San Francisco University High School: Summer Program

    This is a three-summer commitment and a great program preparing kids for college. It provides language and art classes in the morning and social studies such as sports and history in the afternoon. There are also fun activities such as a field day, a party night, a talent show, etc. 30 to 35 tenth-grade children are chosen each summer, so you have to fill out a form. Call 415-749-4558 to know more.

    Rudolf Steiner College: Summer Programs

    Rudolf Steiner has summer programs for those who want to take courses such as teaching grade courses 1 to 8. Registration is at the beginning of April. Call 415-749-4560 for more about it.

    These activities and programs are usually popular, and if you are interested, get up and join us!