A cancer-stricken British teenager said on Thursday she had been moved by messages of support from around the world after writing an online “Bucket List” of things she wanted to do before dying.

    Alice Pyne, 15, created an Internet blog in which she described her fight against a cancer of the white blood cells. “I've been fighting cancer for almost four years and now I know that the cancer is gaining on me and it doesn't look like I'm going to win this one,” she wrote.

    For her list, at the site www. alicepyne. blogspot. com, she has included making everyone sign up to be a bone marrow donor (骨髓捐赠者), swimming with sharks, meeting boy band Take That and getting a purple iPad computer.

Messages of support and offers of help quickly flooded her webpage and it became one of the most talked about subjects on Twitter.

     “Oh dear! And I thought that I was just doing a little blog for a few friends!” she wrote after her site attracted huge attention. “Thank you so much for all your lovely messages to me.”

    Alice, who lives with her family in the northwest English town of Ulverston, said the manager of Take That had arranged for her to see the band after reading her blog. A group of local lawmakers have also made efforts with the Anthony blood cancer charity to encourage people to join its stem cell (干细胞) projects.

    Before we came to Canada in 1951, when I was three, my parents and I spent a year at refugee camp (难民营) in Austria. We had escaped from what was then called Czechoslovakia. My parents had already lost their livelihood once to the Nazi. Mummy was freed from the Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen and spent the years after the war trying to find her family, only to discover she was the only survivor. She met my father in a small town outside Prague. They married and had me in 1948. When we arrived in Montreal, everything we owned was contained in an army trunk and a couple of army blankets. Mummy bought an old sewing machine and some inexpensive materials and using patterns in magazines, taught herself to sew. Her hands were always going, making something. She learned English by singing along to the hit song as she worked.

    For me, high school was a lonely time. My mother worried that I'd never come out of my shell so she signed me up for classes at the Montreal Children's Theatre. That's where I found my voice with her strong faith in me, Mummy had opened a door. Although she was an educated woman, I never heard my mother said “This is what I gave up for you.” She was always there for my younger brother and me. When I sat in the kitchen with her, I felt safe. When she made soup or sewed a ballet costume for me, it was all a gift, a labor of love. She wanted to make us happy. For a long time, I had a picture hanging in the kitchen saying “Put your heart into it.” I grew up with that phrase. Mummy taught that lesson by example, and it has become my own work ethic(职业道德).

    A so-called “smart drug” intended to improve people's cognitive (认知的) function to protect the brain from altitude sickness.

    Visiting high-altitude sites for work, spot, religious pilgrimages and military can result in cognitive effects, including memory loss and attention difficulties. There's little you can do to prevent these symptoms except acclimatize -but this takes time and doesn't always work. A drug called oxiracetam might be the answer.

    ShengLi Hu at the Third Military Medical University, Chongqing, China and her colleagues studied the performance of male military personnel at altitude. All lived in towns around 1,800 meters above sea level, During the study, they spent eight days at this altitude and then climbed for three days to reach 4,000 meters, where they stayed for up to a month.

    Twenty participants took oxriacetam three times a day for the first 15 days of the study, while another 20 received no intervention. The man did tests of attention and memory at the start and end of the study and 20 days in, by which time they had been at 4,000 meters for nine days.

    While all the participants experienced a drop in cognitive ability at 4,00 meters, those who took oxiracetam showed a much smaller drop than the control group.

    The team found that at high altitude the brain stem, which plays a critical role in supporting basic living functions, received blood at the expense of areas responsible for more advanced cognitive functions. But in people who took oxiracetam, blood flowing throughout the brain rose, thus offering more oxygen to these areas. This may be how the drug seems to lessen cognitive problems like with low oxygen.

    It isn't yet known whether diverting blood in this way could have negative effects in the long run. "The results are striking and imply that oxiracetam may be beneficial for helping to relieve cognitive ability decline caused by altitude." says Timothy Hales at the University of Dundee, UK.

    People need to relax and enjoy themselves. One way they can have a good time is to watch a baseball game or another sports event. Even thousands of years ago, groups of people gathered to watch skilled athletes (运动员).

    Over 2000 years ago in Greece, certain days in the year were festival days. These were holidays when people stopped work and enjoyed themselves. They liked to watch athletes take part in races and other games of skill.

The most important festival was held every four years at the town of Olympia. It was held in honor of the Greek god Zeus (宙斯). For five days, athletes from all parts of the Greek world took part in the Olympic Games. At the Olympic Games, people could watch them box, run, jump and so on. There was a relay race between two teams of men in which a lighted torch (火矩) was passed from runner to runner. The Olympic Games were thought to be so important that cities which were at war with one another had to stop fighting. People were allowed to travel to the games safely. Thousands of people came to Olympia from cities in Greece and from her colonies (殖民地) in Africa, Asia and Italy. They met as friends to cheer their favorite athletes and to enjoy themselves.

    Tencent announced yesterday that it will limit the daily time for youngsters to play its popular King of Glory game after parents and schools in Shanghai and other areas complained their children had become addicted to playing it.

    From tomorrow, children younger than 12 will only be allowed to play the game for a maximum(最大值) of one hour a day, and after 9 pm, they will be banned from logging into it, said Tencent. Those older than 12 will be able to play a maximum two hours a day.

    The game system will remind players the time they have been playing and young players will be forced to log out when the time is up.

    Tencent claimed these were the strictest measures in China's game industry to prevent addiction and the company expected they would ease parents' anxiety.

    The company also said it had updated its system for parents to keep tabs on their children using its games.

    Since February, parents can receive messages when children log in and spend money on the game after they connect children's game accounts with their mobile phone numbers.

    Now, parents can connect phones, tablets or computers that their children use to play games, so that they can keep an eye on the children even if they have several game accounts, Tencent said.

    Song Zhe, a father of a Shanghai high school student, welcomed the measures but was not sure if they would be sufficiently effective. "I like the system that could lock up the devices as children can register many accounts," he said, "but children are so clever that they can always think out counter measures."

More than 100 scientists traveled to faraway places to collect wild crop seeds in an effort to help battle climate change. The scientists have been likened to the hero of the Indiana Jones movies. Like him, they had to face blood-sucking creatures and fierce tigers. Some-times, they had to use elephants for transportation because they couldn't find any other means of transportation.

A report on the project was published last week. It described the results of a six-year search to collect thousands of wild seeds. The seeds could be important in feeding a growing human population at a time when rising temperatures are affecting crop production in some areas.

The scientists traveled on foot, by four-wheeled vehicles, boat and riding horses and they even rode elephants to reach faraway areas. They collected 4,644 seed samples of 371 wild relatives of 28 crops. Many of those wild relatives are said to be endangered.

The Crop Trust, a nonprofit organization that works to save different kinds of crops, was directing the project. The group was working in partnership with Britain's Royal Botanic Gardens and Millennium Seed Bank. Additional financial support came from Norway. The project is believed to be the largest organized international effort yet to collect and protect crops' wild relatives.

Some relatives of widely grown crops have developed so they can survive usual and severe conditions such as low rainfall, flooding, extreme temperatures and poor soils. Scientists say the wild crops offer a largely unused source of diversity for protecting crops against climate change.

Some crops are threatened because of destruction of forests, conflict and expanded cities. Experts say losing this diversity could endanger food security around the world. A United Nations report says that food supplies are under severe threat. The report notes that the number of animal and plant species are quickly disappearing as the world deals with how to feed a rising population.