We know the mosquito very well. Mosquitoes fly everywhere. They can be found almost all over the world, and there are more than 2,500 kinds of them.

    No one likes the mosquito. But the mosquito may decide that she loves you. She? Yes, she. It's true that male mosquito doesn't bite(咬) and only the female mosquito bites because she needs blood to lay eggs. She is always looking for things or people she wants to bite. If she likes what she finds, she bites. But if she doesn't like your blood, she will turn to someone else for more delicious blood. Next time a mosquito bites you, just remember you are chosen. You're different from the others!

    If the mosquito likes you, she lands on your body without letting you know. She bites you so quickly and quietly that you may not feel anything different. After she bites, you will have an itch(痒) on your body because she puts something from her mouth together with your blood. By the time the itching begins, and she has flown away.

    And then what happens? Well, after her delicious dinner, the mosquito feels tired. She just wants to find a place to have a good rest. There, on a leaf or a wall, she begins to lay eggs, hundreds of eggs.

    There has long been a notion （观念） that money buys happiness. However, although "we really, really tried that for a couple of generations, it didn't work," said Francine Jay, author of The Joy of Less, A Minimalist Living Guide: How to Declutter, Organize, and Simplify Your Life.

    Thanks to a travel inspired revelation （启发）, Jay has been happily living a simpler life for 12 years. "I always packed as lightly as possible, and found it exciting to get by with just a small carry on bag," she told CNN. "I thought if it feels this great to travel lightly, how amazing would it be to live this way？ I wanted to have that same feeling of freedom in my everyday life."

Jay decided to get rid of all her excess （额外的） possessions and live with just the essentials （必需品）. "I wanted to spend my time and energy on experiences, rather than things."

    Jay is a follower of a movement called "minimalism （极简主义）". Growing numbers of people have been attracted to this lifestyle all over the world. They share the same feeling of disappointment with modern life and a desire to live more simply. Minimalists are typically progressive and concerned about the environment, Leah Watkins, a lead researcher at Ota go University in New Zealand, told Stuff magazine in March.

    But many simply experienced unhappiness caused by owning too many possessions. Depression with the materialism of our world isn't new. English romantic poet William Wordsworth summed up how dispiriting （令人消沉的） this was back in 1802, at the beginning of the industrial age, when he wrote: "Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers". His preference was to go back to nature. Closer to our own times, the hippies （嬉皮士） of the 1960s also sought to "drop out" of modern life.

    And for many minimalists, their key is to unload. Without objects, they "believe people are forced more and more into the present moment and that's where life happens," wrote Stuff.

But does simplicity ever feel like a sacrifice （牺牲）？

    "It's eliminating the excess﹣unused items, unnecessary purchases﹣from your life. Well, I may have fewer possessions, but I have more space …Minimalism is making room for what matters most," said Jay.

    And "the real questions", according to Duane Elgin, US social scientist, are "what do you care about？" and "What do you value?"

    He told CNN: "It's important for people to realize minimalism isn't simply the amount of stuff we consume. It's about our families, our work, our connection with the larger world, our spiritual dimension. It's about how we touch the whole world. It's a way of life."

    Most heroes are not super. They don't appear in comic books, on television, or in movies. They just do what they believe needs to be done to make their world a better place. Bike Batman is one of them.

    Bike Batman is a 30-year-old married engineer who lives in Seattle, Washington. He's a cyclist who also buys and sells bikes as a hobby.

    About three years ago, he was looking for a bike for his wife. He found one on Craigslist, a website where people list things they want to sell. As he often does, he also looked at Bike Index, a popular website that allows users to register their bikes and post reports when they're taken. The bike, which he was considering purchasing, clearly matched one reported stolen on Bike Index. Then he called the person who claimed to be the bike's owner and arranged to meet him— supposedly to complete the sale. When the two men met, Bike Batman told the thief, "You've got two options. You can wait until a police officer gets here, or you can just get out of here." You can imagine what the thief did.

    After that first success, Bike Batman developed a safer routine. When he sees questionable bike ads on Craigslist, he cross-references the image with bikes reported on Bike Index. Once he has confirmed it with the owner, he arranges a meet-up with the thief and will call the Seattle police department so that officers can participate in the action. In more than half of the 22 cases in which he has got back and returned bikes, the thieves have been arrested. In one case, Bike Batman even helped a family recover a wide range of prized possessions that suspects had stolen during a home burglary.

    His nickname came from a discussion with a police officer who suggested he be called "Robin Hood". Since he wasn't exactly stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, "Batman" seemed a better fit. The idea of a superhero punishing criminals feels pretty silly to him, but the main reason he continues his work is to keep up Seattle's reputation as a friendly city.

    Sandra Cisneros was born in Chicago in 1954 to a Mexican American family. As the only girl in a family of seven children, she often felt like she had “seven fathers,” because her six brothers, as well as her father, tried to control her. Feeling shy and unimportant, she retreated(躲避)into books. Despite her love of reading, she did not do well in elementary school because she was too shy to participate.

    In high school, with the encouragement of one particular teacher, Cisneros improved her grades and worked for the school literary magazine. Her father encouraged her to go to college because he thought it would be a good way for her to find a husband. Cisneros did attend college, but instead of searching for a husband, she found a teacher who helped her join the famous graduate writing program at the University of Iowa. At the university's Writers' Workshop, however, she felt lonely－a Mexican American from a poor neighborhood among students from wealthy families. The feeling of being so different helped Cisneros find her “creative voice”.

    “It was not until this moment when I considered myself truly different that my writing acquired a voice. I knew I was a Mexican woman, but I didn't think it had anything to do with why I felt so much imbalance in my life, but it had everything to do with it! That's when I decided I would write about something my classmates couldn't write about.”

    Cisneros published her first work, The House on Mango Street, when she was twenty-nine. The book talks about a young Mexican American girl growing up in a Spanish-speaking area in Chicago, much like the neighborhoods in which Cisneros lived as a child. The book won an award in 1985 and has been used in classes from high school to graduate school level. Since then, Cisneros has published several books of poetry, a children's book, and a short-story collection.

    Have you ever pressed the pedestrian button at a crosswalk and wondered if it really worked? They're called “placebo(安慰剂）buttons” 一buttons that mechanically sound and can be pushed，but provide no functionality.

In New York City, only about 100 of the 1, 000 crosswalk buttons actually function. Crosswalk signals were generally installed before traffic jam had reached today's levels.

    But while their function was taken over by more advanced systems—such as automated lights or traffic sensors — the physical buttons were often kept, rather than being replaced at further expense. Other cities，such as Boston， Dallas and Seattle， have gone through a similar process, leaving them with their own placebo pedestrian buttons. In London, which has 6, 000 traffic signals， pressing the pedestrian button results in a reliable “Wait” light. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the “green man”— or “pedestrian stage” in traffic signal design profession — will appear any sooner.

    “We do have some crossings where the green light comes on automatically, but we still ask people to press the button because that enables accessible features,'' said Glynn Barton, director of network management at Transport for London.

    These features, such as blind tracks and hearable traffic signals, help people with visual disorder cross the road and only function when the button is pressed. As for the lights, a growing number of them are now combined and become a part of an electronic system that detects traffic and adjusts time frequency accordingly (giving priority to buses if they're running late, for example), which means that pressing the button has no effect.

    According to Langer, a Harvard psychologist, placebo buttons give us the illusion (错觉)of control — and something to do in situations where the alternative would be doing nothing. In the case of pedestrian crossings, they may even make us safer by forcing us to pay attention to our surroundings. “They serve a psychological purpose at the very least,” she added.

    The world's insects are hurtling down the path to extinction, threatening a "catastrophic collapse of nature's ecosystems", according to the first global scientific review. More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, the analysis found. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles.

    "It should be of huge concern to all of us, for insects are at the heart of every food web,  they pollinate the large majority of plant species, keep the soil healthy, recycle nutrients, control pests, and much more. Love them or loathe them, we humans cannot survive without insects," said Prof Dave Goulson at the University of Sussex in the UK.

    The analysis, published in the journal Biological Conservation, says intensive agriculture is the main driver of the declines, particularly the heavy use of pesticides. Urbanization and climate change are also significant factors.

    One of the biggest impacts of insect loss is on the many birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish that eat insects. A small number of adaptable species are increasing in number, but not nearly enough to outweigh the big losses.

    Matt Shardlow, at the conservation charity Buglife, said: "It is gravely sobering to see this collation of evidence that demonstrates the pitiful state of the world's insect populations. It is increasingly obvious that the planet's ecology is breaking and there is a need for an intense and global effort to stop and reverse these dreadful trends."