It was Mother's Day morning last year and I was doing my shopping at our local supermarket with my five-year-old son, Tenyson. As we were leaving, we found that only minutes earlier an elderly woman had fallen over at the entrance and had hit her head on the concrete. Her husband was with her, but there was blood everywhere and the woman was embarrassed and clearly in shock.

    Walking towards the scene, Tenyson became very upset about what had happened to the couple. He said to me, “Mum, it's not much fun falling over in front of everyone.”

    At the front of the supermarket a charity(慈善) group had set up a stand selling cooked sausages and flowers to raise funds. Tenyson suggested that we should buy the lady a flower. “It will make her feel better,” he said. I was amazed that he'd come up with such a sweet idea. So we went over to the flower seller and asked her if we could buy a flower for the lady to cheer her up. “Just take it,” she replied. “I can't take your money for such a wonderful gesture.”

    By now paramedics（救援人员）had arrived, and were attending the injured woman. As we walked up to her, my son became intimidated by all the blood and medical equipment. He said he was just too scared to go up to her. Instead I gave the flower to the woman's husband and told him, “ My son was very upset for your wife and wanted to give her this flower to make her feel better.”

    At that, the old man started crying and said, “Thank you so much, you have a wonderful son. Happy Mother's Day to you.”

    The man then bent down and gave his wife the flower, telling her who it was from. Though badly hurt and shaken, the old lady looked up at Tenyson with love in her eyes and gave him a little smile.

    By the mid-nineteenth century, the term “icebox” had entered the American language, but ice was still only beginning to affect the diet of ordinary citizens in the United States. The ice trade grew with the growth of cities. Ice was used in hotels, pubs, and hospitals, and by some forward-looking city dealers in fresh meat, fresh fish, and butler. After the Civil War (1861-1865), as ice was used to refrigerate freight cars(货车), it also came into household use. Even before 1880, half the ice sold in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, and one-third of that sold in Boston and Chicago, went to families for their own use. This had become possible because a new household convenience, the icebox, a precursor（前身）of the modem refrigerator, had been invented.

    Making an efficient icebox was not as easy as we might now suppose. In the early nineteenth century, the knowledge of the physics of heat, which was essential to a science of refrigeration, was undeveloped. The common belief that the best icebox was one that prevented the ice from melting was of course mistaken, for it was the melting of the ice that performed the cooling. Nevertheless, early efforts to economize ice included wrapping the ice in blankets, which kept the ice from doing its job. Not until near the end of the nineteenth century did inventors achieve the delicate balance of insulation(绝缘) and circulation needed for an efficient icebox.

    But as early as 1803, an intelligent Maryland farmer, Thomas Moore, had been on the right track. He owned a farm about twenty miles outside the city of Washington, for which the village of Georgetown was the market center. When he used an icebox of his own design to transport his butter to market, he found that customers would pass up the rapidly melting butter of his competitors to pay an extra price for his butter, still fresh and hard in neat, one-pound bricks. One advantage of his icebox, Moore explained, was that fanners would no longer have to travel to market at night in order to keep their produce cool.

    Insects(昆虫) are a very healthy food. They have almost as much protein(蛋白质) as meat from a pig or cow and are low in fat. Eating insects is also very good for the environment since they need less land and water than larger animals.

    Marcel Dicke, who studies insects, explained in a talk how insects also produce more meat from the food they eat. For example, imagine a farmer feeds a cow 10 pounds of food. Those 10 pounds of food produce about 1 pound of meat for people to eat. However, imagine the farmer gives a certain number of insects 10 pounds of food. Those 10 pounds of food produce 9 pounds of meat for people to eat!

    Eating more insects can also help people in poor areas. Many people can raise and sell insects, which can provide jobs and food.

    But insects will not replace animal meat very quickly. First, people in some countries would have to change how they think about eating insects. Many people in North America and Europe eat a lot of meat like beef and pork. But they do not traditionally eat insects. In fact, for many people in the west, eating insects sounds crazy. They believe insects are dirty and dangerous. Insects make them feel uncomfortable.

    Some people are trying to deal with this problem. For example, David George Gordon wrote a book named “The Eat-A-Bug Cookbook”, which tries to show people that insects can be delicious. Other insect experts travel around telling people about the benefits of eating insects. But they will still have a lot work to do.

    Boomerang children who return to live with their parents after university can be good for families, leading to closer, more supportive relationships and increased contact between the generations, a study has found.

    The findings contradict research published earlier this year showing that returning adult children trigger a significant decline in their parents' quality of life and wellbeing.

    The young adults taking part in the study were “more positive than might have been expected” about moving back home – the shame is reduced as so many of their peers are in the same position, and they acknowledged the benefits of their parents' financial and emotional support. Daughters were happier than sons, often slipping back easily into teenage patterns of behaviour, the study found.

    Parents on the whole were more uncertain, expressing concern about the likely duration of the arrangement and how to manage it. But they acknowledged that things were different for graduates today, who leave university with huge debts and fewer job opportunities.

    The families featured in the study were middle-class and tended to view the achievement of adult independence for their children as a “family project”. Parents accepted that their children required support as university students and then as graduates returning home, as they tried to find jobs paying enough to enable them to move out and get on the housing ladder.

    “However,” the study says, “day-to-day tensions about the prospects of achieving different dimensions of independence, which in a few extreme cases came close to conflict, characterised the experience of a majority of parents and a little over half the graduates”.

    Areas of disagreement included chores, money and social life. While parents were keen to help, they also wanted different relationships from those they had with their own parents, and continuing to support their adult children allowed them to remain close.

    When Huang Lizhi took her first class in African sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa in February, her professor asked her and her classmates what impresses them most when it comes to Africa.

    Unexpectedly, Huang, 31, found that words like "poverty" and "safari" – negative words that were often associated with the continent in media reports – were the kind of terms her African classmates didn't want to hear. Instead, they preferred to hear the question answered in this way: "Africa is the cradle of humankind" and "Africans are passionate and generous".

    Apparently, there are some misunderstandings between us. It's true that with incidents like the Ebola outbreak in Western Africa and the emergence (出现) of pirates off the coast of Somalia hitting the news, it's easy for us to keep forgetting that Africa has one of the world's oldest civilizations – Egypt, born by the world's longest river, the Nile. The proof is in the Great Pyramid of Giza and the Great Sphinx of Giza, which are both popular among tourists. And the tombs of ancient Egypt have also become endless sources for the literature and film industries.

    When it comes to the natural environment of Africa, our misunderstandings are only bigger. But the truth is that instead of being extremely hot all year and covered by desert, the continent has large areas of savannas (稀树草原) where lions, giraffes and zebras live, the snowcapped Kilimanjaro – the highest mountain in Africa – and even thick forest on the island of Madagascar. These misunderstandings are one of the reasons why the 2018 Beijing Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation was held on Sept 3 and 4 – to understand each other better.

    Indeed, only by visiting Africa herself did Huang see the convenient living conditions, the amazing natural beauty and the friendly people. In her eyes, her classmates were as hopeful about the future of their own countries as they were about Africa as a whole, and they were quick to demonstrate both their strong will and activity. "At that moment, I knew exactly what they wanted – they wanted their culture to be respected."

    When Johnny, a homeless man, spent his last $20, he wasn't looking at it as an investment — but it's about to pay him huge profits. After he helped a woman who ran out of gas, she returned the favor by raising a lot more on the Internet.

    Kate McClure, 27, was driving to visit a friend when she ran out of gas halfway. “He saw me pull over and knew something was wrong," she wrote. "He told me to get back in the car and lock the doors. A few minutes later, he came back with a red gas can, using his last 20 dollars to make sure I could get home safe."

    She couldn't repay him at that time because she had no cash with her. "I have been stopping by his spot for the past few weeks. I repaid him for the gas and gave him some clothes."

    Kate decided to do more for him, so she started a crowdfunding(众筹) campaign on GoFundMe.com, and it quickly gained far beyond its initial $10,000 goal. When it reached $100,000, the fundraising page was shut down for a time at Johnny's request. Because he didn't want to seem like he was taking advantage of the situation. Finally, Kate said that she restarted it because the public interest had not decreased. She also added that Johnny planned to donate the rest to a good cause.

    According to the New York Post, Johnny wants to get a job at an Amazon warehouse and a department manager from the tech company has already reached out, saying he wants to help Jonny.