Living and dealing with kids can be a tough job these days, but living and dealing with parents can be even tougher.

    If I have learned anything in my 16 years, it is that communication is very important, both when you disagree and when you get along. With any relationship, you need to let other person know how you are feeling. If you are not able to communicate, you drift apart. When you are mad at your parents, or anyone else, not talking to them doesn't solve anything.

    Communication begins with the concerns of another. It means that you can't just come home from school, go up to your room and ignore everyone. Even if you just say “Hi”, and see how their day was for five minutes, it is better than nothing.

    If you looked up the word “communication” in a dictionary, it would say “the exchange of ideas, the conveyance （表达）of information, correspondence （通信）, means of communication: a letter or a message”. To maintain (保持) a good relationship, you must keep communication strong. Let people know how you feel, even if it's just by writing a note.

    When dealing with parents, you always have to make them feel good about how they are doing as a parent. If you are trying to make them see something as you see it, tell them that you'll listen to what they have to say, but ask them politely to listen to you. Yelling or walking away only makes the situation worse.

    This is an example: one night, Sophie went to a street party with her friends. She knew she had to be home by midnight after the fireworks, but she didn't feel she could just ask to go home. That would be rude. After all, they had been nice enough to take her along with them. Needless to say, she was late getting home. Her parents were mad at first, not when Sophie explained why she was late, they weren't as mad and let the incident go. Communication is the key factor here. If Sophie's parents had not been willing to listen, Sophie would have been in a lot of trouble.

    Communication isn't a one-way deal: it goes both ways. Just remember: if you get into a situation like Sophie's, telling the other person how you feel-listening is the key factor to communication.

    People are less willing to rely on their knowledge and say they know something when they have access (接近) to the Internet, suggesting that our connection to the web is affecting how we think.

    Professor Evan Risko, of the Department of Psychology at the University of Waterloo, led a recent study where the team asked about 100 participants (参与者) a series of general-knowledge questions, such as naming the capital of France. For half of the study, participants had access to the Internet. They had to look up the answer when they responded that they did not know the answer. In the other half of the study, participants did not have access to the Internet.

    The team found that the people who had access to the web were about 5 percent more likely to say that they did not know the answer to the question. Furthermore, in some cases, the people with access to the Internet reported feeling as though they knew less compared to the people without access.

    “With the popularity of the Internet, we are almost frequently connected to large amounts of information. And when that data is within reach, people seem less likely to rely on their own knowledge,” said Professor Risko.

    Studying the results, the researchers thought that access to the Internet might make it less acceptable to say you know something but are incorrect. It is also possible that participants were more likely to say they didn't know an answer when they had access to the web because online searching offers an opportunity to confirm their answer, and the process of finding out the answer is rewarding.

    “Our results suggest that access to the Internet affects the decisions we make about what we know and don't know,” said Risko. “We hope this research helps us understand how easy access to large amounts of information can influence our thinking and behaviour.”

    For centuries, medical pioneers have refined a variety of methods and medicines to treat sickness, injury, and disability, enabling people to live longer and healthier lives.

    “A salamander (a small lizard-like animal) can grow back its leg. Why can't a human do the same?” asked Peruvian-born surgeon Dr. Anthony Atala in a recent interview. The question, a reference to work aiming to grow new limbs for wounded soldiers, captures the inventive spirit of regenerative medicine. This innovative field seeks to provide patients with replacement body parts.

These parts are not made of steel; they are the real things — living cells, tissue, and even organs.

    Regenerative medicine is still mostly experimental, with clinical applications limited to procedures such as growing sheets of skin on burns and wounds. One of its most significant advances took place in 1999，when a research group at North Carolina's Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine conducted a successful organ replacement with a laboratory-grown bladder. Since then, the team, led by Dr. Atala, has continued to generate a variety of other tissues and organs—from kidneys to ears.

    The field of regenerative medicine builds on work conducted in the early twentieth century with the first successful transplants of donated human soft tissue and bone. However, donor organs are not always the best option. First of all, they are in short supply, and many people die while waiting for an available organ; in the United States alone, more than 100,000 people are waiting for organ transplants. Secondly, a patient's body may ultimately reject the transplanted donor organ. An advantage of regenerative medicine is that the tissues are grown from a patient's own cells and will not be rejected by the body's immune system.

    Today, several labs are working to create bioartificial body parts. Scientists at Columbia and Yale Universities have grown a jawbone and a lung. At the University of Minnesota, Doris Taylor has created a beating bioartificial rat heart. Dr. Atala's medical team has reported long-term success with bioengineered bladders implanted into young patients with spina bifida (a birth defect that involves the incomplete development of the spinal cord). And at the University of Michigan, H. David Humes has created an artificial kidney.

    So far, the kidney procedure has only been used successfully with sheep, but there is hope that one day similar kidney will be implantable in a human patient. The continuing research of scientists such as these may eventually make donor organs unnecessary and, as a result, significantly increase individuals' chances of survival.

    Everyone should be so lucky as to have a friend like Francia Raisa. On Thursday, singer and actress Selena Gomez, 25, used Instagram to explain why she was "laying low" this summer. She posted a photo of herself in a hospital bed with her friend Francia Raisa holding hands. She said she recently received a kidney transplant from her best friend because of complications(并发症) from lupus(狼疮), an autoimmune disease, which means it is the result of the immune system attacking normal tissue, including the kidneys, brain, heart and lungs.

    People with lupus may first experience tiredness, joint pain or a little bit of rash(皮疹) on their bodies and can go for a long time before their doctors realize it is more serious. Many people see two or four doctors before the real problem is picked up. According to Dr. Kyriakos Kirou, roughly a third to one-half of people with lupus develop kidney disease, and up to one in five of them will eventually need a transplant, sometimes because they weren't treated with effective drugs to prevent the immune system from attacking the kidneys. Though Gomez said that she was "very well now," she warned about the dangers of not taking medical diagnoses seriously, like she initially did.

    Her Instagram post also called attention to two major health topics: the need for living organ donators and the fact that Gomez represents three groups more likely to be diagnosed with lupus and lupus-related kidney disease. Nine out of 10 people diagnosed with lupus are women, and most develop the disease between the ages of 15 to 44. And lupus is two to three times more common among women of color, including Hispanic women, according to the Lupus Foundation.

    Raisa is Latina, and Gomez's father is of Mexican origin. While it's not essential that the organ donator and receiver be of the same ethnicity, people who share a similar background sometimes are better matched, according to data from the United Network for Organ Sharing.

As I drove along the road, a small car flew across the center divider from the opposite direction and crashed into my car head-on, I fainted and was awakened by the ringing of my mobile phone.

I was brought to Kuala Lumpur General Hospital bleeding on from my nose, mouth and legs. But the hospital staff was too busy to attend to me, so I called a friend to tell him about the accident. Some friends arrived very soon and sent me to a private hospital nearby. I saw my injured feet hanging from my body, blue and lifeless, and I begged the doctors to save them at all costs. They calmly promised to do their best.

The doctors made it. After I was discharged, I was given ten months medical leave. My heart sank, knowing that it meant I, a big man, couldn't work. How was I going to support my 65-year-old mother and other family members? I felt completely helpless, but a lot of unexpected blessings came my way. I had many visitors during my 14 days in hospital and when I was recovering at home. Friends and relatives helped me with my banking, insurance or simply came to cheer me up.

When the casts (石膏) were removed, I did not let the sight of my weak legs discourage me. I worked hard at my physiotherapy (物理疗法) with only one aim. After eight months, I was walking without the aid of a walking stick. On February the following year, I returned to my job again. Today, after eight years, I have travelled to many countries as a tour leader.

The accident makes me realize how lives can change in a split second. I value life more, not only of my own but also of everyone I know, and I will always try to help when I know of someone in trouble.