Time is more precious than money for an increasing number of people who are choosing to live more with less—and liking it.

    Kay and Charles Giddens, two lawyers, sold their home to start a B&B hotel. Four years later, the couple dishes out banana pancake breakfast, cleans toilets and serves homemade chocolate chip cookies to guests in a B&B hotel surrounded by trees on a hill known for colourful sunsets.

    “Do I miss the freeways? Do I miss the traffic? Do I miss the stress? No,” says Ms. Giddens, “This is a phenomenon that's fairly widespread. A lot of people are revaluating their lives and figuring out what they want to do. If their base is being damaged, what's the payoff?”

    Simple living ranges from cutting down on weeknight activities to sharing housing, living closer to work, avoiding shopping malls, borrowing books from the library instead of buying them, and taking a cut in pay to work at a more pleasurable job.

    Vicki Robin, a writer, lives on a budget equal to a fifth of what she used to make. “You become conscious about where your money is going and how valuable it is,” Ms. Robin says, “You tend not to use things up. You cook at home rather than eat out…”

    Janet Luhrs, a lawyer, quit her job after giving birth and leaving her daughter with a nanny for two weeks. “It was not the way I wanted to raise my kids,” she says, “Simplicity is not just about saving money; it's about me sitting down every night with my kids to a candlelit dinner with classical music.”

    Mrs. Luhrs now edits a magazine, Simple Living, which publishes tips on how to buy recycled furniture and shoes, organize potluck dinners instead of expensive receptions, and generally how to consume less.

    Mrs. Luhrs explains, “It's not about poverty. It's about conscious living and creating the life you want. The less stuff you buy, the less money goes out of the door, and the less money you have to earn.”

    Last week I was riding my special motorbike and then stopped at a convenience store.As I was getting my wheelchair off the back,a man watched me from his car and I noticed a wheelchair in his back seat.We spoke for a moment and I asked him about the wheelchair.He answered that it was for his daughter.“Well,do you think she would like to go for a ride on my motorbike with me?”I asked.He seemed shocked that a total stranger would ask him this.He thought about it for a second and said,“OK,as long as I can follow you.”

    He introduced me to Amy and he sat her on my back seat.Her father followed me for a few miles and she talked non-stop about what she wanted for Christmas.

    As we came back to the convenience store,she said,“This ride is the best Christmas present I could ever receive. I have been in a wheelchair my whole life and didn't know I could do this.”I told her about some of the other things I do (ski,travel the world by myself,etc.).As her father was taking her off my bike,she turned to him and said,“Oh Daddy,I'm going to be OK.Mr.Bryant does all kinds of things,and I win too.” Her father turned away as a tear of joy rolled down his cheek.He hugged me and said,“I was sitting here praying for a gift for Amy that would encourage her.She often felt that her life was dull compared to other children.God answered my prayer just now.Now I pray that God will bless you for your gift to Amy today.” I believed what he said.Being kind and thoughtful to others,we can be an answer to prayer.

    You may think, salt is just a simple cooking element we shake on our food for a little extra taste. But salt is much more than that. Without salt our muscles would not move. Our nervous systems would not operate. Our hearts would not beat.

    But do not think rubbing salt in a wound will help. Doing that would be painful and not heal the wound. To rub salt in a wound is an idiom that means to purposefully make a bad situation worse.

    Early humans got the salt they needed to stay alive from the animals they killed. But advances in agriculture led to a diet low in salt. So, humans needed to find other sources. Those who lived near the ocean or other natural sources for salt were lucky. Those who did not had to trade for salt. In fact, people used salt as a method of payment in many parts of the ancient world. The word “salary” comes from the word “salt”.

    Salt also played an important part in population movement and world exploration. Explorers understood that if they could keep food fresh, they could travel longer distances. So they used salt to preserve food and explored the world.

    Salt was so important that, according to food historians, it was traded pound-for- pound for gold. Today, people still use the expressions “to be worth one's salt” or “worth one's weight in salt”. The expressions describe a person of value.

    A person might also be called “salt of the earth”. That description means he or she is dependable and trustworthy. However, when you say “I think we should take what he said with a grain of salt” you mean you accept it but maintain a degree of doubt about its truth.

    When I was younger, I thought that boys and grown men should not cry. The tears were signs of being weak and a sissy(胆小鬼), which a man is not supposed to be. This was even strengthened in my young mind when the song, Boys Don't Cry, came out in the early 1980s.

    But just this June, I discovered that courage is not all about trying to keep all the pain inside in check. Courage is not all about trying to hide the tears. It is the opposite — the tears strengthen the heart's courage. And I saw this in my father. That day my father cried.

    My 18-year-old sister eloped (私奔) and from it I saw how weak my father's heart was. My sister and I were used to seeing him as an iron-willed figure and authoritarian father.

    For three days after my sister eloped, he would not talk. He would just sit quietly outside our house in the dark. On the fourth night, I sat beside him and asked him to tell me what he felt about everything.

    It has been years since I have laid my hand on my father's shoulder as we have drifted apart (疏远) farther and farther while I was growing up. That night，though, I sensed my father trying to control his pain and I wanted him to be able to let it out. We have all cried over what happened except him. All of us except him.

    The simple touch and my words, "Dad, it is not your fault.", broke my father's dam.

    In the darkness, he began to cry. I felt his shoulders shaking as he whispered, "Where did

    I go wrong? All I ever wanted was for my children to grow up right. Why couldn't your sister wait?"

    I understood then why he preferred to be in the dark. By being there, he hoped to spare his family of a father's pain. His tears, though we did not see them before that night, were there all the same. I saw his courage, that night when my father cried with my hand on his shoulder, and understood his pain.

    In 2009 a new flu virus was discovered. Combining elements of the viruses that cause bird flu and swine flu, this new virus, named H1N1, spread quickly. Within weeks, public health agencies around the world feared a terrible pandemic (流行病) was under way. Some commentators warned of an outbreak on the scale of the 1918 Spanish flu. Worse, no vaccine(疫苗) was readily available. The only hope public health authorities had was to slow its spread. But to do that, they needed to know where it already was.

    In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) required that doctors inform them of new flu cases. Yet the picture of the pandemic that showed up was always a week or two out of date. People might feel sick for days but wait before consulting a doctor. Relaying the information back to the central organizations took time, and the CDC only figured out the numbers once a week. With a rapidly spreading disease, a two-week lag is an eternity. This delay completely blinded public health agencies at the most urgent moments.

    Few weeks before the H1N1 virus made headlines, engineers at the Internet giant Google published a paper in Nature. It got experts' attention but was overlooked. The authors explained how Google could "predict" the spread of the winter flu, not just nationally, but down to specific regions and even states. Since Google receives more than three billion search queries every day and saves them all, it had plenty of data to work with.

    Google took the 50 million most common search terms that Americans type and compared the list with CDC data on the spread of seasonal flu between 2003 and 2008. The idea was to identify areas affected by the flu virus by what people searched for on the Internet. Others had tried to do this with Internet search terms, but no one else had as much data-processing power, as Google.

    While the Googles guessed that the searches might be aimed at getting flu information—typing phrases like "medicine for cough and fever"—that wasn't the point: they didn't know, and they designed a system that didn't care. All their system did was look for correlations(相关性) between the frequency of certain search queries and the spread of the flu over time and space. In total, they processed 450 million different mathematical models in order to test the search terms, comparing their predictions against actual flu cases from the CDC in 2007 and 2008. And their software found a combination of 45 search terms that had a strong correlation between their prediction and the official figures nationwide. Like the CDC, they could tell where the flu had spread, but unlike the CDC they could tell it in near real time, not a week or two after the fact.

    Thus, when the H1N1 crisis struck in 2009, Google's system proved to be a more useful and timely indicator than government statistics with their natural reporting lags. Public health officials were armed with valuable information.

    Strikingly, Google's method is built on "big data"—the ability of society to handle information in new ways to produce useful insights or goods and services of significant value. However,   ▲  . For example, in 2012 it identified a sudden rise in flu cases, but overstated the amount, perhaps because of too much media attention about the flu. Yet what is clear is that the next time a pandemic comes around, the world will have a better tool to predict and thus prevent its spread.

    Being stuck at home doesn't mean that learning stops. In fact, it's just the opposite. Here are some activities and resources to foster kids' imagination and build their curiosity at home.

    Let's Get Down to the Science

The science lab at school may be closed, but you can still put on goggles and a white lab coat and learn at home. This Test Tube Experiment Kit will make you feel like a genius in no time. Kids will get the chance to learn about basic chemistry, physics, and more by creating pop-resistant bubbles, bouncy balls, and other objects.

    To Infinity (无穷) and Beyond

Earth is a part of the Milky Way galaxy, but did you know there are around 100 million galaxies in the universe? There are so many fun and fascinating things to learn about space that the possibilities truly go to infinity and beyond. A great way start your child's educational space adventure is with this Real Life Sticker and Activity Book.

    Take a Walk on the Wild Side

    Biology class is in session! Here's your chance to get up close and personal with a great white shark without putting on a wetsuit. This 4D Great White Shark Anatomy Kit allows you to get an inside look at what makes these predators of the deep so powerful. And then take an even deeper dive into a shark's world with I Am Shark.

    Take advantage of this time at home and find new ways to keep exploring the world around you.