When your child lies to you, it hurts. As parents, it makes us angry and we take it personally. We feel like we can never trust our child again. Why does lying cause such anger, pain and worry for parents?

    Parents are understandably very afraid of their children getting hurt and getting into trouble, but they have very little protection against these things as they send their kids out into the word. Kids learn from other kids and from external media, and this makes parents feel unsafe because they can't control the information and ideas that their children are exposed to.

    When your kid lies, you start to see him as “sneaky（卑鄙的）”, especially if he continues to lie to you. You feel that he's going behind your back. You begin to think that your kids are “bad”. Because, certainly, if lying is bad, liars are bad. It's just that simple. Parents need to make their kids responsible for lying. But the mistake parents make is that they start to blame the kid for lying. It's considered immoral to lie. But when you look at your kid like he's a sneak, it's a slippery slope （滑坡谬误）that starts with “You lie” and ends up at “You're a bad person”.

    Kids know lying is forbidden. But they don't see it as hurtful. So a kid will say, “I know it's wrong that l eat a sugar snack when I'm not supposed to. But who does it hurt?” “I know it's wrong that I trade my dried fruit for a Twinkie. But it doesn't really hurt anybody. I can handle it. What's the big deal?” That's what the kid sees.

    So I think that parents have to assume that kids are going to tell them lies, because they're immature and they don't understand how hurtful these things are. They're all drawn to excitement, and they'll all have a tendency to distort（歪曲）the truth because they're kids.

    Often people receive a guitar, mandolin, or some other musical instrument as a birthday or Christmas gift. There's joy everywhere. The giver of the gift knows how much the receiver wants to learn this instrument and the receiver is actually holding it in his hands instead of longing for it through the shop window.

    Finding an instructor that fits into a busy work schedule is hard enough, but once you decide on a lesson plan, then you must consider the practice time, how to practice, what to practice—and let's face it...not all people learn something the same way. So in order to learn a musical instrument, how much practice time is enough and what kind of practice is right for you?

    There is no set amount of time that anyone should practice a musical instrument. When I was in programming classes, I could have studied nightly for 5 hours each night. It would have taken me years to learn the art of computer programming. Though I'm attracted by the systematic logic of it, my talent is towards another thing. However, on the other hand, if I spent an hour every couple days with a passionate hobby like playing the violin, not only would the time fly quickly...I'd also be learning at a much greater speed since the built-in passion is the motivation for advancement.

    So as much as it's important to practice, a step back is to first find the harmonious instrument that fits you as a person; as development of your personality. If you're learning the guitar because it's cool....obviously that's the modern-day mindset, however, you might not be actually linking your talent for musical satisfaction with your most creative advantages you have to offer.

    It's been my experience that every person has a certain level of musical talent. My pleasant challenge has been to assist them in this adventure and actually locate their best abilities as quickly as possible. Then and only then can we match learners with instruments and truly begin a fun and exciting walk down the road of happiness and contentment, where music, ability, personality and soul all meet. Once this piece of the mystery puzzle is in place, I've never had to work at motivating a learner to practice...

    Getting stitched(缝合)up by Dr. Robot may one day be reality. Scientists have created a robotic system which did just that in living animals without a real doctor pulling the strings. Much like engineers are designing self-driving cars, the medical research is part of a move toward autonomous surgical robots, removing the surgeon's hands from certain tasks that a machine might perform all by itself.

    Doctors wouldn't leave the bedside they're supposed to watch, plus they'd handle the rest of the surgery. In small tests using pigs, the robotic arm performed at least as well, and in some cases a bit better, as some competing surgeons in stitching together intestinal(肠的)tissue. “The purpose wasn't to replace surgeons,” said Dr. Kim who led the project. “If you have all intelligent tool that works with a surgeon, can it improve the outcome? That's what we have done.”

    If you've heard about machines like the popular Da Vinci system, you might think robots already are operating. Not really. Today many hospitals offer robot-assisted surgery, where surgeons use the machinery as tools that they control by hand, typically,to operate through tiny openings in the body. But robot-assisted surgery has been controversial, as some studies have shown it can bring higher costs without better outcomes.

    Kim's team at Children's Sheikh Zayed Institute invented the new STAR system—it stands for Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot—works sort of like a programmable sewing machine. They added sensors to help guide each stitch and tell how tightly to pull. But the approach wasn't perfect. In the living animals, the robot took much longer and made a few stitching mistakes while the surgeon sewing by hand made none. Kim said the robot can be sped up. Fie hopes to begin human studies in two or three years.

    When an Indiana woman got an emergency call that her mother was in hospital, she knew she had no time to waste getting to her mom's side in Montgomery, Alabama. As she pulled over to get gas about 170 miles from her destination, the woman reached for her purse. It wasn't there. In the flurry to get to her mother's side, she'd left her handbag at home, along with her wallet and phone.

    The woman felt totally at a loss. Desperate for help, she asked for help in a truck stop. Someone sent her up the road to Jim Oliver's Smoke House, a restaurant known for its generosity. In fact, it's even been nominated (提名) as one of the Nicest Places in America.

    In the parking lot of the restaurant, the woman broke down telling her story to the owner, James Oliver. He listened patiently, checking her car for an Indiana license plate and deciding whether he should believe her. To her astonishment, he handed her $200 in cash. In hopes of calming her down, Oliver offered her a meal, which she took to go so she could get back on the road.

    Handing hundreds of dollars over to a stranger might seem crazy to some people, but to Oliver, it's common sense. He figured a tank of gas alone would cost $75 or so, and she'd need more money for a motel room and food before she could work things out with her credit card. “I instinctively (本能地) went for $200,” he says. “I didn't think of getting it back.”

    The Smoke House has had a reputation for kindness ever since Oliver's dad, the original owner, was in charge. In addition to helping travelers in need, Oliver's father was involved in the community by helping to establish a state park, daycare, medical center, and more. “Growing up, he instilled (灌输) in us to help other people,” says Oliver.

    The Smoke House might look like a business, but it's a charity at heart. “When you've got food, you can't turn people away that need help,” says Oliver.

    A famous Anglican Church stands in a quiet corner of Dunedin in New Zealand's South Island. Built in 1865, it is the city's oldest church still in use. Countless couples have gathered here to marry. It's where morning tears are shared, friendships formed and comfort given during times of loss.

    As with many churches, its walls are graced with a collection of beautiful stained-glass windows. Known as the "John Allen window", one window portrays the short life of a local man, John Allen, who died in 1915 in the Gallipoli campaign in Turkey.

    John was the son of Sir James Allen, who as Minister of Defense, helped plan and administer New Zealand's World War I strategy, which saw 100,000 troops sent to fight. With the war over and his son dead, Sir James chose to install a window in the church, with which the Allen family had strong ties.

    Divided into two parts, one depicts (描绘) St. George, the patron saint (守护神) of soldiers, while the other has an angel of peace, along with the words at the bottom, "John Hugh All Gallipoli, 6th June, 1915". Two trees with local birds on the branches can be seen and a kiwi walks at the bottom- reminders that John was a lover of birds.

    "There are many war memorials in the church," says the church. "However the 'John Allen window' stands out; it touches people because of the beautiful design, the New Zealand birds and because John's story, of a life so full of promise ending tragically in the war, reflects the lives and stories of so many others involved in World War I."

    Sweet potato plants don't have spines or poisons to defend themselves. But some have evolved a clever way to let hungry herbivores (食草动物) know they aren't an all-you-can-eat buffet, a new study finds. When one leaf injured, it produces a chemical that warms the rest of the plant and its neighbors to make themselves inedible (不宜食用的)to bugs. Sweet potato breeders could potentially engineer plants to produce the chemical as an all-natural pest defense.

    Plant ecologists led by Axel Mithofer of the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, started to look into sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) defenses after they noticed something interesting about two varieties of the plant grown in Taiwan: The yellow-skinned, yellow-fleshed Tainong 57 is generally herbivore-resistant, but its darker orange cousin, Tainong 66, is plagued (造成麻烦) by insect pests.

    To find out why, the team offered up Tainong 57 and 66 plants to hungry African cotton leafworm caterpillars (毛虫).Both plants released at least 40 airborne compounds as the caterpillars snacked on their leaves. But Tainong 57 produced a lot more of a chemical called DMNT, which has a very distinct smell, the team details this month in Scientific Reports. ("The smell is not nice," Mithofer says. "You wouldn't want it as a perfume.")

    DMNT isn't a new compound; researchers have isolated (分离出) the smelly chemical from other plants such as corn and cabbage, and it is known to induce defense responses in some species.

    To determine whether this was happening in sweet potatoes, scientists set up two experiments. First, they put two plants next to each other and wounded one so it produced DMNT. Then, they exposed healthy Tainong 57 plants to DMNT they had synthesized (合成).In both cases, the DMNT caused the exposed plants to produce more of a protein called sporamin in their leaves. (Tainong 66 did not have the same reaction.) When the caterpillar's snack on sporamin, "they immediately stop eating because they don't feel well," Mithofer says.

    Sporamin is the main protein in sweet potato tubers (块茎),and is indigestible raw, which is why sweet potatoes must be cooked for humans to enjoy them. "If the caterpillars could cook it, they could eat it," Mithofer says. Theoretically, he says, sweet potato breeders could use genetic engineering to make different varieties of sweet potato produce as much DMNT as Tainong 57, and display the same defense responses.

    Still, the research isn't ready for prime time, cautions plant ecologist Martin Heil. DMNT might work in the lab, but in the field, airborne chemicals can be "blown away in seconds," says Heil, who studies plant-insect interactions at the National Polytechnic Institute in Irapuato, Mexico.

    Mithofer himself has no plans now to create genetically engineered sweet potato plants, because they would not be a viable (能活下去的) crop in Europe, where genetically modified crops are outlawed. So for now, Tainong 66 will have to put up with being a caterpillar salad bar.