It was summer 2019 in Aurora, Colorado, when CBS News first met Finn Lanning, a math teacher, and Damien, his student who always stood out.
Lanning was astonished when Damien told him he was not coming back to 1. He sat Damien down and found out what his story was. He learned that Damien had a 2 in heart and was in foster (寄养) care because social services couldn't find a foster family willing and able to meet his medical needs. He was 3 to leave school and move into a hospital.
But the real 4 was that Damien needed a transplant desperately. A lot of times it's 5 to get a transplant if someone doesn't have a stable home to return to after surgery.
"It 6 me like a ton of bricks. I mean, you just can't sit across from somebody you care about and hear them say something like that and know that you have room to help," Lanning said. That's how Lanning became a foster parent. He 7 Damien even though he'd been a confirmed bachelor (单身汉) who delighted in his childlessness.
They got along smoothly, although Damien refused to get too excited. "I'm afraid the bubbles will burst one day. It's kind of bad thinking about that, but some people actually do that. Like, they'll be happy with you one day and then just kick you out the next," Damien said. Lanning told him he's not going anywhere, 8 Damien believes it or not.
In the nearly two years since CBS News shared their story, Damien was able to get a transplant and he's a much 9 15-year-old. "It's like a dream come true," Damien said.
It's proof that sometimes 10 do end happily ever after.
Chinese New Year is a celebration marking the end of the winter season and the beginning of spring. This is decorating with plants, fruits and flowers carries special significance. They represent the earth (come) back to life and best wishes for new beginnings. Orange trees are a symbol of wealth. Bamboos are associated with health, abundance and a happy home. The plum trees are the first (flower) even as the snow is melting. They represent the promise of spring and a renewal of life.
Arctic foxes live on the land and sea ice within the Arctic Circle, the sun never rises to give warmth and light from October to February. Luckily, their long, fluffy tails act like a blanket to keep warm when they (wrap) the tail around their body to sleep. Their feet also have a layer of thick fur, helps cover footsteps. And their white coats make it difficult for predators such as (wolf), polar bears, and golden eagles to spot them among the ice and snow.
Born in New Zealand, Helen (live) in Guatemala for four years and then in the United States. When she was fifty, she had a dream: walking to the North Pole alone. On her journey, she was (complete) alone except for her dog, Charlie, a Canadian husky. She walked 345 miles in temperature of -50℃. When she (attack) by seven polar bears, it was lucky for her to have Charlie by her side.
New Jersey Botanical Garden Membership
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The Botanical Garden started life as Skylands, a large area in the grand manner. It is famous for a 44-room Tudor Revival granite mansion designed by John Russell Pope. Skylands has 96 acres of formal and naturalized gardens and is surrounded by over 1,000 acres of meadows and woodlands. Purchased by the State in 1966 and officially named as the New Jersey Botanical Garden in 1984, the gardens contain approximately 5,000 species and varieties of trees and flowers. For you, the NJBG is an exciting and beautiful place to visit where you may enjoy each season's best. Members enjoy special events, festivals, lectures, and rewarding educational opportunities for both city and country gardeners.
Your NJBG membership offers you discounts at participating nurseries, garden centers and other fine businesses. Simply present your NJBG membership card when beginning your purchase:
• Goffle Brook Farm and Garden Center, (201) 652-7540 10% off your purchase
• Metropolitan Plant Exchange, (973) 638-7613 12% off your purchase
• Rohsler's Allendale Nursery & Florist, (201) 327-3156 15% off your purchase
Alexis, 17, sat quietly in the passenger seat of her dad's car. She let her eyes lazily scan the landscape for wildlife. Then a deer came into view about 200 yards in front of them. "Dad, there's a deer there!" Alexis said. It was a male deer with sharp antlers (角) on each side of its head.
As the car moved closer, Alexis saw that the deer's head was bent toward the ground. Then she heard a scream and saw an arm fly up near the deer's head. Alexis realized the deer was attacking a woman. Sue, a 44-year-old mother, had been out for her morning run. The deer followed her and edged closer. "I knew I was in trouble," Sue says. She went to pick up a stick for self-defense, and the deer charged. It lifted her with its antlers and threw her into the air. Sue could feel blood flew down her leg.
Within seconds, the deer had pushed her off the road. When Alexis and her father pulled up, the deer was throwing Sue like a doll. Alexis looked into the woman's terrified eyes, and before her father had even stopped the car, the teenager jumped quickly out of the car and ran toward the deer.
"I was kicking it to get its attention," she says. Then her father, who had followed his daughter, pushed the deer away from the women.
Alexis helped Sue into the car, and then applied a piece of cloth to Sue's injured leg. "We're going to get you to a hospital," Alexis said. Then she heard her father shout loudly. He had been knocked to the ground. Alexis took hold of a hammer from the car and ran to where her father lay on his back. She beat the deer's head and neck, but the blows didn't scare it away. "I was losing faith," she says. "A couple more strikes, Alexis," said her father. "You can do it." Turning the hammer around, Alexis closed her eyes and beat the deer's neck with all her strength. When she opened her eyes, the deer was running away. Alexis got in the driver's seat and sped toward the nearest hospital.
After Sue was treated, she tearfully thanked her rescuers. "You expect a teenage girl to get on the phone and call for help," she says, "not to beat up a deer."
When learning a foreign language, most people fall back on traditional methods: reading, writing, listening and repeating. But if you also gesture with your arms while studying, you can remember the vocabulary better. Linking a word to brain areas responsible for movement strengthens the memory of its meaning. This is the conclusion a research team in Leipzig reached after using magnetic pulses to deliberately disrupt these areas in language learners. "Our results provide neuroscientific evidence for why learning techniques that involve the body's motor system should be used more often," neuroscientist Brian Mathias, said in a news release.
As Mathias and his colleagues describe in the Journal of Neuroscience, they had 22 German-speaking adults learn a total of go invented artificial words (such as "lamube" for "camera", and "atesi" for "thought") over four days. While the test subjects first heard the new vocabulary, they were simultaneously shown a video of a person making a gesture that matched the meaning of the word. When the word was repeated, the subjects performed the gesture themselves.
Five months later, they were asked to translate the vocabulary they had learned into German in a multiple-choice test. At the same time, they had an apparatus (装置)attached to their heads that sent weak magnetic pulses to their primary motor cortex——the brain area that controls voluntary arm movements. When these interfering signals were active, the subjects found it harder to recall the words that were accompanied by gestures. When the apparatus sent no interfering signals (but still appeared to the subjects to be active), they found it easier to remember the words. The researchers concluded that the motor cortex contributed to the translation of the vocabulary learned with gestures. This applied to concrete words, such as "camera", as well as abstract ones, such as "thought."
"There's now quite a lot of literature showing that gestures play a role in learning. I think where this study takes it a step further is trying to understand why," says Susan Goldin-Meadow, a psychologist who studies the effects of gestures on learning but was not involved in the new study. Research like this, as well as brain imaging, suggests the activation of the brain's motor areas could be a factor. "It's not necessarily the only reason why," Goldin-Meadow adds, "but it's probably a contributor."
The effect did not occur when the test subjects were only presented with matching pictures instead of gestures when learning vocabulary. In an experiment published in 2020, the Leipzig research team found that the adult brain uses motor areas to remember foreign-language words. But it is not only the motor component itself that promotes learning. The meaning of the gesture also figures in ——gestures particularly promote the memory of words if they represent the meaning of the word pictorially.
"I think we underuse gesture in our classrooms," Goldin-Meadow says. "People use it spontaneously (自发地), if they're good teachers and good listeners. We don't necessarily bring it into the class if we don't think about it, but it could be used more often and more effectively."
For several decades, there has been an extensive and organized campaign intended to generate distrust in science, funded by those whose interests and ideologies are threatened by the findings of modern science. In response, scientists have tended to stress the success of science. After all, scientists have been right about most things.
Stressing successes isn't wrong, but for many people it's not persuasive. An alternative answer to the question "Why trust science?" is that scientists use the so-called scientific method. If you've got a high school science textbook lying around, you'll probably find that answer in it. But what is typically thought to be the scientific method — develop a hypothesis (假设), then design an experiment to test it — isn't what scientists actually do. Science is dynamic: new methods get invented; old ones get abandoned; and sometimes, scientists can be found doing many different things.
If there is no identifiable scientific method, then what is the reason for trust in science? The answer is how those claims are evaluated. The common element in modern science, regardless of the specific field or the particular methods being used, is the strict scrutiny (审查) of claims. It's this tough, sustained process that works to make sure faulty claims are rejected. A scientific claim is never accepted as true until it has gone through a lengthy "peer review" because the reviewers are experts in the same field who have both the right and the obligation to find faults.
A key aspect of scientific judgment is that it is done collectively. No claim gets accepted until it has been vetted by dozens, if not hundreds, of heads. In areas that have been contested, like climate science and vaccine safety, it's thousands. This is why we are generally justified in not worrying too much if a single scientist, even a very famous one, disagrees with the claim. And this is why diversity in science — the more people looking at a claim from different angles — is important.
Does this process ever go wrong? Of course. Scientists are humans. There is always the possibility of revising a claim on the basis of new evidence. Some people argue that we should not trust science because scientists are "always changing their minds." While examples of truly settled science being overturned are far fewer than is sometimes claimed, they do exist. But the beauty of this scientific process is that it explains what might otherwise appear paradoxical (矛盾的): that science produces both novelty and stability. Scientists do change their minds in the face of new evidence, but this is a strength of science, not a weakness.
Bad News for the Highly Intelligent
There are advantages to being smart. People who do well on IQ tests tend to be more successful in the classroom and the workplace. They also tend to live longer, healthier lives, and are less likely to experience negative life events.
In a study, Ruth Karpinski and her colleagues carried out a study on the members of Mensa, a high IQ society. The study covered mood disorders and anxiety disorders. Respondents were asked to report whether they had ever suffered from each disorder. The researchers compared the percentage of those who reported disorder to the national average and found that Mensa's highly intelligent members were more likely to suffer from a range of serious disorders.
To explain their findings, Karpinski and his team bring up the hyper brain and hyper body theory. This theory holds that, for all of its advantages, being highly intelligent is associated with psychological and physiological "overexcitabilities", or OE. This can include anything from an astonishing sound to conflict with another person. According to the theory, OEs are more common in highly intelligent people. A highly intelligent person may overanalyze a disapproving comment made by a boss, imagining negative outcomes that simply wouldn't occur to someone less intelligent.
The results of this study must be interpreted (诠释) cautiously. Showing that a disorder is more common in a sample of people with high IQs than in the general population doesn't prove that high intelligence is the cause of the disorder. All the same, the findings set the stage for research that promises to cast new light on the link between intelligence and health. One possibility is that associations between intelligence and health outcomes reflect pleiotropy (基因多效性), which occurs when a gene influences seemingly unrelated characteristics. In a 2015 study, Rosalind Arden and her colleagues concluded that the association between IQ and living longer is mostly explained by genetic factors. From a practical standpoint, this research may lead to insights about how to improve people's psychological and physical well-being.
A. Now there's some bad news for those smart people.
B. There is already some evidence to suggest that this is the case.
C. It is an unusually strong reaction to an environmental threat or abuse.
D. Scientists did many researches to understand the reasons behind the advantages.
E. That may cause the body's stress response, which may make the person even more anxious.
F. It's also possible that people who join Mensa differ from other people in ways other than just IQ.
G. They found that the differences between the respondents were seen for mood and anxiety disorders.
In a growing number of school districts across America, students must wear a uniform. According to the US Department of Education, wearing a uniform can maintain discipline and help schools recognize those who come to the school illegally. Schools claim that when students come in uniform, it improves discipline and leads to academic gains. However, students protested the decision.
A more important question is whether there is any evidence to show that mandatory (强制的) uniform policies can lead to improved student outcomes. A 2003 study that used a large national data set concluded that elementary and middle schools with school uniforms had fewer student behavior problems. But it found that high schools had a greater frequency of misbehavior.
Interestingly, even when evidence is available, educators could take the opposite view. For example, a study of educators in 38 North Carolina high schools found that 61% of the school masters believed that there was a reduction in cases of misbehavior on campus when school uniforms were introduced. In reality, the data showed no change in incidents of suspensions (停学) and other problems.
Similarly, research on the effectiveness of school uniforms on increasing student attendance and achievement is confusing. For example, one study concluded that school uniforms resulted in increased student achievement and increased attendance. However, another study found little impact on academics at all levels and little evidence of improvement in attendance for girls and drop in attendance for boys. So, what does lack of consistent research mean for policy?
In my view, it does not mean that schools should not carry out such policies. It does mean, however, that educators must be clear about the goals that they hope to achieve. Decreased discipline problems, increased attendance and academic achievement may not be achieved just by wearing uniforms. But there may be other benefits, for instance, it could help a school promote its brand through a uniform look. School uniforms may also serve as a symbol of commitment to academic achievement.
Some studies showed wearing school uniforms helped improve students' performance, but other studies found no consistent results, so schools should stop the school uniform policy.
