In June 2014, two leading media in America reported that three-year-old Victoria Wilcher, who suffered facial scarring, was kicked out of a KFC because she was a frightening customer. Later, KFC announced that no evidence had been found to support the story. This phenomenon is largely a product of the increasing pressure in newsrooms that care more about traffic figures.

    Brooke Binkowski, an editor, says that she has seen a shift towards less responsibility in newsrooms. “Clickbait is king, so newsrooms will uncritically print something unreal. Not all newsrooms are like this, but a lot of them are.”

    Asked what the driving factor was, a journalist said, “You've a strict editor and you've to meet your targets. And some young journalists are inexperienced and will not do those checks. So much news reported online happens online. There is no need to get out and knock on someone's door. You just sit at your desk and do it.”

    Another journalist says, “More clicks equal more money. At my former employer in particular, the pressure was due to the limited resources. That made the environment quite horrible to work in.”

    In a Feb. 2015 report for Digital Journalism, Craig Silverman wrote, “Today the bar for what is worth giving attention to seems to be much lower. Within minutes or hours, a badly sourced report can be changed into a story that is repeated by dozens of news websites, resulting in tens of thousands of shares. The rumor becomes true for readers simply by virtue of its ubiquity.”

    And, despite the direction that some newsrooms seem to be heading in, a critical eye is becoming more, not less important, according to the New York Times' public editor, Margaret Sullivan. “Reporters and editors have to be more careful than ever before. It's extremely important to question and to prove before publication.” Yet those working in newsrooms talk of doubtful stories being tolerated. In the words of some senior editors, “a click is a click, regardless of the advantage of a story”. And, “if the story does turn out to be false, it's simply a chance for another bite at the cherry.”

    Lawns（草坪）are some of the most common things in the world until you really start thinking about them. That's when you realize that they make no sense. Why do people keep these uninteresting, pointless little plants outside their homes? They're not beautiful like flowers, they don't provide food and you have to take care of them constantly.

    Israeli bestselling author Yuval Noah Harari thought these deeds were weird too. He looked into their history and ended up with an interesting story.

    No one considered putting patches of grass outside their homes in ancient times. That changed in the Middle Ages, when French and English kings and nobles started putting patches of grass at their castle entrances.

    “Well-kept lawns demand land and a lot of work,” wrote Harari in his book. “In exchange, they produce nothing of value.” Peasants could never afford to waste their time or land on lawns, so these lawns were a perfect status symbol（身份的象征）for nobility（高贵）.

    When the Industrial Revolution began in the 18th and 19th centuries, the middle classes started being able to afford their own suburban（郊区的）houses. And guess what became the suburban status symbol? A perfectly kept lawn.

    The popularity of lawns continued to grow, taking over public event spaces and sports. In the past, people played sports on all kinds of surfaces—dirt, ice, sand. But in the last couple centuries, they made the switch to green grass.

    “Grass is nowadays the most widespread crop in the USA after corn and wheat,” Harari continued. Lawns spread beyond Europe and the U.S, and they're now status symbols around the world.

    Suburban people may not realize it, but they care for lawns just because centuries ago, French and English kings wanted to show off by intentionally planting something useless. It's strange that people should continue to spend so much time and money on what's really a leftover（遗留物）from the Middle Ages. When you plan your house, you can shake off（摆脱）the cultural leftover and imagine for yourself a rock garden or some other new creation.

    WIPO is the global forum for intellectual property services, policy, information and cooperation. We are a self﹣funding agency of the United Nations, with 191 member states.

    Our mission is to lead the development of a balanced and effective international intellectual property （IP） system that enables innovation and creativity for the benefit of all.

    Our mandate, governing bodies and procedures are set out in the WIPO convention, which established WIPO in 1967.

    We run workshops and seminars throughout the year. The presentations and meeting documents are made available for downloading wherever possible here.

Current and upcoming

    Case Study Workshop on Support for Intellectual Property Management in SMEs （IP Advantage）

    National Workshop on Intellectual Property Policies for Universities and Research Institutions

    Consultation meetings with the Industrial Property Protections Directorate of the Ministry of Industry, Trade and supply and the main relevant institutions

    National seminar on collective management

Emilia Dobek traces her interest in space and the universe back to third grade when she and her father watched a blood moon—a total lunar eclipse (月蚀)—on the roof of their house.

    Now a seventh-grader at East Prairie Elementary School, Dobek recently won the national Discovery Education Lockheed-Martin Beyond Challenge by designing a space station for travelling to Mars.

    She says that night watching the lunar eclipse started a strong desire in her that has yet to run out of fuel. So when her teacher Andrea Smeeton received information about the national challenge, Smeeton said she immediately had one student in mind.

    "I knew she would love the challenge and that she would go way beyond in her search," Smeeton said. "She immediately started researching bone density (密度) of astronauts and how to have food on Mars."

    "My design will ensure the safety of the astronauts but also make sure their comfort is out of this world," Dobek says.

    Dobek's design calls for building the MSS or Mars Storage Station to put the supplies in. It also includes the SGF or Self-Crowing Farm, and she details how it would work with the elements on Mars.

    Then there is physical and leisure activity for the astronauts under Dobek's design. A simulation (模拟装置) allows astronauts to choose their exercise machine and virtual (虚拟的) reality environment. Rooms have circular ceilings so astronauts will be able to watch downloaded shows and even see places on Earth, such as their homes.

    "I want to tell other kids to follow their passions." Dobek said. "Whatever they want to do they should push for it and always try their best."

    In 1988, after being diagnosed with kidney cancer, Fenn, a high-end gallery owner, came up with a crazy plan: He would bury some of his favorite artifacts somewhere in the Rocky Mountains and then die next to them. "My desire was to hide the treasure and let my body stay there and go back to the soil," he explains.

    The contents are worth somewhere between $I million and $5 million. Then he took his treasure chest out into the Rockies and hid it.He wanted it to be found. But he wasn't going to just give it away.

    In 2010, Fenn self-published a book, The Thrill of the Chase, which includes a 24-line poem that Fenn claims contains nine clues that "will lead to my treasure."

    At first, nobody really noticed. But word spread, and the chase was on.(The book is now out of print, and copies show up on Amazon for as much as $3,200.) Fenn estimates that 350,000 people from across the globe have searched or are currently searching for his treasure. Yet nobody has found it.

    The problem with Fenn's poem is that the "clues" can be interpreted a million different ways. The "home of Brown," for instance, could be Browns Canyon National Monument in Colorado, or Brown Hill in New Mexico. Or a cabin or a bear.(Don't laugh; several people have already looked.)

    "It's all in the poem," some have recently started sharing more details," and the treasure isn't in a mine, I mean, they have snakes in' em. It's between 5,000 feet and 10,200 feet above sea level. It's not in Canada or Idaho or Utah or a grave-yard."

    Why are Fenn's treasure hunters so into what seems like a ridiculous thing to do with their time? Many are quick to say that their lives have been enriched by their experiences. "It's changed us," Neitzel says. "made us more confident, and even saved our marriages. Nothing scares us anymore." They thank Fenn for giving them a reason to take a risk, for giving their lives meaning. Many claim that even if they found Fenn's chest, they wouldn't necessarily spend the money—and might even rehide the chest. Another hunter had this tantalizing insight: "I hope that I never find the treasure. The journey will be treasure enough."

    And so the hunt continues.

It is the stock response to a parent struggling with a crying baby or a bad-tempered teenager: "Treasure every moment because they grow up so fast." Now researchers have found there may be something in the old saying. Watching children grow up really does seem to make time fly. Scientists have found that parents feel time passing more quickly than non-parents.

The findings could be due to the fact that children change fast. "Over ten years, children go through dramatic changes not only in their physical appearance, but also in their understanding abilities and their status," the researchers said. The results could also be a consequence of parents spending a large amount of their time on their children, they said, even though they found no difference in the time pressures recorded by parents compared with non-parents in the study.

For the study, published in the journal Timing & Time Perception (感知), the researchers asked 431 people aged from 20 to 59 to fill in a subjective time questionnaire, a tool used by psychologists to measure time perception. They were asked: "How fast did the last ten years pass for you?" An answer of very slowly gave a score of-2; slowly was-I; neither fast nor slow was 0; fast was I and very fast scored 2. So the higher the score, the faster they felt time had passed. The parents had an average score of I. 22, compared with 0. 76 for the non-parents.

Participants were also asked how quickly the last year, month and week had passed, but there were no differences between the groups for these shorter intervals (间隔). Previous studies have suggested that time also seems to speed up when we get older. Research published in 2019 by Duke University in North Carolina suggests this could be due to physical changes in our bodies, with a slowdown in image processing speeding up our perception of time passing.

Days that seemed to last forever in our youth were "not due to experiences being much deeper or meaningful", the researcher Adrian Bejan said, "but due to the fact that they were being processed rapidly."