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    According to the International Ecotourism Society, eco-travel is "responsible travel to natural areas that protects the environment, maintains the well-beings and involves education". Eco-travel is on the rise, as more and more people become conscious about their carbon footprint.

    Expert from Boundless Journeys, Matt Holmes, who works-on travel experiences towards conserving areas said, "As scientists and non-scientists learn more about how we human beings are impacting the planet, I think more people want to do what they can while still exploring the world. Our guests are definitely interested in that aspect of our journeys. Travelers can farm their own food in Italy, managing their use of water and using solar or wind power. They can also visit n family-run camp that cares for retired logging elephants in Myanmar, know a park entry fee goes to a conservation organization in Costa Rica, employ and train members of the local community or partner with a protection group. There are lots of options for seeking out greener holiday."

    Most people believe that eco-travel is expensive and it is true. Matt explained "Anti-poaching patrols (巡逻) need to be paid, solar energy equipment costs a lot to install, building with environmentally friendly, materials is more expensive and so on. The extra cost is necessary, as you're paying to minimize your footprint and protect the places you visit, which is exactly what eco-travel is about. The financial success and sustainability (可持续性) of an eco- focused operation doesn't come from thin air." The industry is trying to make eco-travel affordable and make it accessible to the common people.

    The world's first "Sky Pool" has been uncoated — and it'll give anyone a touch of dizziness, unless he or she is not bothered by heights.

    Situated in the capital's new riverside district beside Battersea Power Station, the glass pool, hanging 10 storeys, or 110 feet up as a bridge between two apartment buildings, is 25 meters long, 5 meters wide and 3 meters deep with a water depth of 1.2 meters. Swimmers will be able to look down 35 meters to the street below as they take a dip, with only 20 cm of glass between them and the outside world. It's even got a bar, folding chairs and an orange garden.

    The pool will be part of Embassy Gardens at Nine Elms, a huge £15 billion building project beside the new American Embassy in south-west London. The project is creating thousands of apartments, the smallest of which are expected to cost nearly $1 million, and the pool will only be open to the apartments' owners.

    Embassy Gardens takes design inspiration (灵感) from the Meatpacking District of New York with floor to ceiling windows and brick frontages. The Sky Pool's transparent structure is the result of important development in technologies over the past ten years.

    The experience of the pool will be truly unique (独特的) and it will feel like floating through the air in central London.

    Those people lucky enough to swim there will have a perfect view of the Palace of Westminster and the London Eye. It will be a selling point for developers when the second stage of the development is released (投放) to market.

    No student of a foreign language needs to be told that grammar is complex. By changing the order of the words and by adding a range of auxiliary verbs (助动词) ,we are able to communicate variations in meaning. We can turn a statement into a question, state whether an action has taken place or is soon to take place, and perform other word tricks to convey delicate differences in meaning. Besides. grammar is universal and plays a part in every language. no matter how widespread it is. So the question which has confused many linguists is: who created grammar?

    At first, this question would appear impossible to answer. To find out how grammar is created. someone needs to be present at the time of a language's creation, documenting its emergence. Some linguists are able to trace modern complex languages back to earlier languages, but to know the forming of complex languages, the researcher needs to observe how languages are started from scratch. Amazingly, however, this is possible.

    Some recent languages evolved due to the Atlantic slave trade. At that time. slaves from different nations were forced to work together. Since they could not learn each other's languages. they developed a pidgin. Pidgins are strings of words copied from the language of the landowners. Little grammar is found in them. and in many cases it is difficult or a listener to infer when an event happened, and who did what to whom. Speakers need to use circumlocution (迁回曲折的说法) in order to make themselves understood. Interestingly. however, all it takes for a pidgin to become a complex language is for a group of children to be exposed to it. Slave children did not simply copy words from their elders, they adapted them to create a language. It included new word orders and grammatical markers. Complex grammar systems merging from pidgins are termed creoles, which are invented by children.

    Some linguists believe that many of the world's most established languages were creoles at first. The -ed ending in English past tense may have evolved from "did", "It ended", which was first used by kids, may once have been "It end-did". Therefore. it would appear that even the most widespread languages were partly created by children. Children appear to have been born with grammatical machinery in their brains. which can serve to create logical, complex structures, even when there is no grammar present for them to copy.

A scientist working at her lab bench and a six-month-old baby playing with his food might seem to have little in common. After all, the scientist is engaged in serious research to uncover the very nature of the physical world, and the baby is, well, just playing…right? Perhaps, but some developmental psychologist have argued that this "play" is more like a scientific investigation than one might think.

Take a closer look at the baby playing at the table. Each time the bowl of rice is pushed over the table edge, it falls in the ground — and, in the process, it brings out important evidence about how physical objects interact; bowls of rice do not float in mid-sit, but require support to remain stable. It is likely that babies are not born knowing the basic fact of the universe; nor are they ever clearly taught it. Instead, babies may form an understanding of object support through repeated experiments and then build on this knowledge to learn even more about how objects interact. Though their ranges and tools differ, the baby's investigation and the scientist's experiment appear to share the same aim (to learn about the natural world, overall approach (gathering direct evidence from the world), and logic (are my observations what I expected?).

Some psychologists suggest that young children learn about more — than just the physical world in this way that they investigate human psychology and the rules of language using similar means. For example, it may only be through repeated experiments, evidence gathering, and finally overturning a theory, that a baby will come to accept the idea that other people can have different views and desires from what he or she has. For example, unlike the child, Mommy actually doesn't like Dove chocolate.

Viewing childhood development as a scientific investigation throws on how children learn, but it also offers an inspiring look at science and scientists. Why do young children and scientists seems to be so much alike? Psychologists have suggested that science as an effort — the desire to explore, explain, and understand our world — is simply something that comes from our babyhood. Perhaps evolution provided human babies with curiosity and a natural drive to explain their worlds, and adult scientists simply make use of the same drive that served them as children. The same cognitive systems that make young children feel good about figuring something out may have been adopted by adult scientists. As some psychologists put it, "It is not that children are little scientists but that scientists are big children."

The death of languages is not a new phenomenon. Languages usually have a relatively short life span as well as a very high death rate. Only a few, including Egyptian, Chinese, Greek, Latin, have lasted more than 2,000 years.

What is new, however, is the speed at which they are dying out. Europe's colonial conquests caused a sharp decline in linguistic diversity, eliminating at least 15 percent of all languages spoken at the time. Over the last 300 years, Europe has lost a dozen, and Australia has only 20 left of the 250 spoken at the end of the 18th century.

The rise of nation-states has also been decisive in selecting and consolidating national languages and sidelining others. By making great efforts to establish an official language in education, the media and the civil service, national governments have deliberately tried to eliminate minority languages.

This process of linguistic standardization has been boosted by industrialization and scientific progress, which have imposed new methods of communication that are swift, straightforward and practical. Language diversity came to be seen as an obstacle to trade and the spread of knowledge. Monolingualism became an ideal.

More recently, the internationalization of financial markets, the spread of information by electronic media and other aspects of globalization have intensified the threat to "small" languages. A language not on the Internet is a language that "no longer exists'' in the modern world. It is out of the game.

The serious effects of the death of languages are evident. First of all, it is possible that if we all ended up speaking the same language, our brains would lose some of their natural capacity for linguistic inventiveness. We would never be able to figure out the origins of human language or resolve the mystery of "the first language". As each language dies, a chapter of human history closes.

Multilingualism is the most accurate reflection of multiculturalism. The destruction of the first will inevitably lead to the loss of the second. Imposing a language without any links to a people's culture and way of life stifles the expression of their collective genius. A language is not only used for the main instrument of human communication. It also expresses the world vision of those who speak it, their ways of using knowledge. To safeguard languages is an urgent matter.

Recently I read Nineteen Eighty-Four, a novel by George Orwell set in a state where even the language they use is controlled. Adjectives are forbidden and instead they use phrases such as 'ungood', 'plus good' and 'double plus good' to express emotions. As I first read this I thought how impossible it would be in our society to have such vocabulary. However, the more I thought about it, the more I realised in its own way it's already happening. I type messages to my friends and alongside each is the emoji. I often use them to emphasise something, or to not seem too serious, or because this specific GIF conveys my emotions much better than I ever could using just words. And I wonder, with our excessive use of emojis, are we losing the beauty and diversity of our vocabulary?

English has the largest vocabulary in the world, with over one million words, but who's to say what it'll be like in the future? Perhaps we will have a shorter language, full of saying 'cry face' if something sad happens or using abbreviations (缩写) like LOL (laugh out loud) or BRB (be right back) instead of saying the full phrase. So does this mean our vocabulary will shrink? Is it the start of an exciting new era? Will they look back on us in the future and say this is where it all began – the new language? Or is this a classic case of the older generations saying, 'Things weren't like that when I was younger. We didn't use emoticons to show our emotions'?

Yet when you look back over time, the power of image has always been there. Even in the prehistoric era they used imagery to communicate, and what's even more incredible is that we are able to analyse those drawings and understand the meaning of them thousands of years later. Pictures have the ability to transcend time and language. Images, be it cave paintings or emojis, allow us to convey a message that's not restrictive but rather universal.

Hannah Levine decided she wanted to give hugs to all of the children and families in need at local hospitals.

Because she couldn't give them hugs one by one, Levine, then a sixth-grader, decided she would use her talents (才能) to do the next best thing. She began to knit (编织) hats, scarves, and blankets for families staying at the Ronald McDonald House at Stanford. Her creations also went to Bundle of Joy, a programme that provides newborn baby items for families in need, and to Knitting Pals by the Bay, a local organisation that provides hand-knitted caps to cancer patients.

"I love to knit, and I thought it would be a great idea to make all these handmade items for kids and adults who need them. It would be like a hug for them," Levine explained.

Levine started the project about a year ago. "I think it's just really fun to do, and it keeps me busy," said Levine, now 13.

Once she got started, Levine realized that her project could be much bigger than the goods she was able to produce with just her own hands. So she sent emails to her school and communities, asking for knitted donations (捐赠物) to the project she named "Hannah's Warm Hugs". She also posted advertisements at Starbucks and other locations in her area. The warm goods began to pour in.

"It was amazing; more strangers than people she knew started dropping donations at our door," said Levine's mother, Laura Levine. "We ended up with this huge box of items she was donating."

The knitted items numbered in the hundreds. Levine made her first round of donations around Hanukkah (an eight-day Jewish holiday in November or December) and later received thank-you letters from the organisations. Levine is still knitting, and she said the project will continue.

"It has turned into a bigger thing than she had thought," her mum said. "It made her feel pretty good; it made us feel pretty good."

Do you think the United Kingdom and the United States are alike? Winston Churchill once joked that the people of Britain and the people of America are separated only by their language. Do you think that is true? The British and the Americans both speak English as the official language. However, each uses some different words. We Americans are similar to the British. After all, our country was once owned by the UK, so we have a lot in common. But there are many differences between us.

The UK has a king or queen, and the leader of the government is the Prime Minister. The US has no kings or queens. Our leader is the President.

Both the British and Americans use pounds and ounces, pints, quarts, and gallons. Both use miles, yards, and feet. Our money is different, though. The British use pounds and pence. Americans use dollars and cents.

Driving in a car is very different in the UK. They drive on the left side of the road. We drive on the right. What we call the hood of the car, the British call the "bonnet". British cars run on "petrol", which we call gasoline.

In our everyday life, we do many of the same things as the British. But we describe them differently. A young mother here might push a baby in a baby carriage. A British mum pushes a "pram". The British watch "telly", while we watch TV. We like to eat French fries, but the British call them "chips". Millions of Americans drink coffee, but most British prefer tea.

So we are different in many ways. But we stay friendly anyway.

A lot of us lose life's tough situations by mounting a frontal attack when a touch of humor might well enable us to chalk up a win. Consider the case of a young friend of mine, Sam, who hit a traffic jam on the way to work. Although there was a good reason for Sam's constant lateness-serious illness at home, he decided that this by-now-familiar excuse wouldn't work any longer. His boss was probably already pacing up and down with a dismissal speech prepared.

He was. Sam entered the office at 9:35. The place was as quiet as a locker room. Sam's boss approached him. Suddenly, Sam reached out his hand. "How do you do!" he said. "I' m Sam Maynard. I'm applying for a job which I understand became available just 35 minutes ago. Does the early bird get the worm?" The room exploded in laughter. The boss smiled and walked back to his office. Sam Maynard saved his job with the only tool that could win a laugh.

Here is another example. An English hostess was giving a formal dinner for eight distinguished guests. She had asked her son to serve a large roast turkey. The boy only succeeded in dropping the bird onto the dining-room floor. Moving only her head, the hostess smiled at her son, "No harm, Daniel," she said, "just pick it up and take it back to the kitchen", she said clearly so he would think about what she was saying and bring in the other one. Some humorous words changed the dinner from a red-faced embarrassment to a ton of fun.

Humor is a most effective, yet frequently neglected(忽视)means of handling the difficult situations in our lives. It can be used for making up differences, saying sorry, saying no, criticizing, and getting the other person to do what you want without his losing face. Also, many believe that comedians on television are doing more today for racial and religious tolerance than people are in any other places.

Of course, humor is often more than a laughing matter. In its potent guises(有效的伪装), it has a Trojan-horse(特洛伊木马)nature: no one goes on guard against a laugh; we let it in because it looks like a little wooden toy. Once inside, however, it can turn a city to reform, to rebellion(反抗), to resistance.

A healthy lifestyle includes many choices. Among them, choosing a balanced diet or healthy eating plan is of the greatest importance. But how do you choose a healthy eating plan? Let's begin by explaining what a healthy eating plan is.

A healthy eating plan that helps you manage your weight includes different kinds of foods you may not have considered. If "healthy eating" makes you think about the foods you can't have, try refocusing on all the new foods you can eat.

Fresh, Frozen, or Canned Fruits -- don't think about just apples or bananas. All fresh, frozen, or canned fruits are great choices. Be sure to try some fruits from other countries, too. How about a mango, a juicy pineapple or kiwi fruit? What you should pay attention to about canned fruits is that they may contain added sugars. You'd better choose canned fruits packed in water or in their own juice.

Fresh, Frozen, or Canned Vegetables – try something new. Don't eat the same kinds of vegetables all the time. You can try to eat different kinds of vegetables, which is important for a good diet. When trying canned vegetables, look for vegetables without added salt or butter. You can go to the produce department(果蔬部) and try a new vegetable each week.

Calcium(钙)-rich foods -- you may firstly think of a glass of low-fat or fat-free milk when someone says "Eat more dairy products " But what about low-fat and fat-free yogurts without added sugars? There is a wide variety of flavors and they can be a great dessert instead of those with a sweet tooth.

What's more, you don't need to give up your favorite comfort food. You can enjoy your favorite foods even if they are high in calories, fat or added sugars. The key is eating them only once in a while, and balancing them out with healthier foods and more physical activity.

The point is that you can figure out how to include almost any food in your healthy eating plan in a way that still helps you lose weight or maintain a healthy weight.

Each year, the women of Olney and Liberal compete in an unusual footrace. Dressed in aprons (围裙) and headscarves, they wait at both towns' starting lines. Each woman holds a frying pan with one pancake inside. At the signal, the women flip (轻抛) pancakes and they're off!

This "pancake racing" tradition is said to have started on Shrove Tuesday, 1445, in Olney. Shrove Tuesday is the day before the Christian season of Lent (大斋戒) begins. During Lent, many people decide to give up sugary or fatty foods.

Legend says that in 1445, an Olney woman was making pancakes to use up some of her sugar and cooking fats before Lent. She lost track of time and suddenly heard the church bells ring, signaling the beginning of the Shrove Tuesday service. Realizing that she was going to be late for church, she raced out the door still wearing her apron and headscarf and holding her frying pan with a pancake in it. In the following years, the woman's neighbors imitated her dash to church, and pancake racing was born.

The rules are simple. Racers must wear the traditional headscarf and apron. They must flip their pancakes twice - once before starting and once after crossing the finish line. After the race, there are Shrove Tuesday church services. Then Liberal and Olney connect through a video call to compare race times and declare a winner.

In both towns, the races have grown into larger festivals. Olney's festival is an all-day event starting with a big pancake breakfast. Liberal's festival lasts four days and includes a parade, a talent show, and contests that feature eating and flipping pancakes. Although the women's race is still the main event, both towns now hold additional races for boys and girls of all ages.

Shimon, a four-armed robot with a ball-like head, holds small mallets(球棍) in "hands" to play a kind of music called a marimba. As he plays, his head moves around in time to the music.

Using "deep learning", Shimon was taught to write his own music. He could not only make up his own music, but do it in real time, while playing with other musicians. This is called "improvising".

Now he is back with a whole bunch of new tricks. He can write the words to his own songs, and sing them. Shimon learned to write the words for the songs the same way he learned to write music – by being "fed" thousands of examples. Shimon was trained on the lyrics (歌词) to 50,000 songs.

Georgia Tech professor Gil Weinberg, who leads the Shimon project, gets Shimon going with a starting idea. Shimon then writes the lyrics based around that idea. Mr. Weinberg usually provides much of the music for the songs, but Shimon helps out there, too.

Singing the songs is another story. To give Shimon a voice, the Georgia Tech team worked with experts at Pompeu Fabra University. The voice was created using AI and sounds very much like a man.

Later this spring, the team plans to put out an album of about 8-10 of Shimon's songs. The album will be released on the music streaming service Spotify. There are also plans for Shimon to go on tour with a band to play and sing his songs live.

For Mr. Weinberg, that's the main goal behind the Shimon Project – not to have robots take over, but to have robots and humans make something beautiful together.

Does handwriting matter? Not very much, according to many educators. However, scientists say it is far too soon to declare handwriting is not important. New evidence suggests that the link between handwriting and educational development is deep.

Children not only learn to read more quickly when they first learn to write by hand, but they are also better able to create ideas and remember information. In other words, it's not only what we write that matters —- but how.

A study led by Karin James, a psychologist at Indiana University, gave support to that view. A group of children, who had not learned to read and write, were offered a letter or a shape on a card and asked to copy it in one of three ways: draw the image on a page but with a dotted outline(虚线), draw it on a piece of blank white paper, or type it on a computer. Then the researchers put the children in a brain scanner and showed them the image again.

It was found that when children had drawn a letter freehand without a dotted outline or a computer, the activity in three areas of the brain were increased. These three areas work actively in adults when they read and write. By contrast, children who chose the other two ways showed no such effect. Dr. James attributes the differences to the process of free handwriting: not only must we first plan and take action in a way but we are also likely to produce a result that is variable. Those are not necessary when we have an outline.

It's time for educators to change their mind and pay more attention to children's handwriting.

Have you ever run into a careless cell phone user on the street? Perhaps they were busy talking, texting or checking updates on WeChat without looking at what was going on around them. As the number of this new "species" of human has kept rising, they have been given a new name — phubbers(低头族).

Recently, a cartoon created by students from China Central Academy of Fine Arts put this group of people under the spotlight. In the short film, phubbers with various social identities bury themselves in their phones. A doctor plays with his cell phone while letting his patient die, a pretty woman takes selfie in front of a car accident site, and a father loses his child without knowing about it while using his mobile phone. A chain of similar events eventually leads to the destruction of the world.

Although the ending sounds overstated, the damage phubbing can bring is real.

Your health is the first to bear the effect and result of it. "Constantly bending your head to check your cell phone could damage your neck," Guangming Daily quoted doctors as saying, "the neck is like a rope that breaks after long-term stretching." Also, staring at cell phones for long periods of time will damage your eyesight gradually, according to the report.

But that's not all. Being a phubber could also damage your social skills and drive you away from your friends and family. At reunions with family or friends, many people tend to stick to their cell phones while others are chatting happily with each other and this creates a strange atmosphere, Qilu Evening News reported.

It can also cost you your life. There have been lots of reports on phubbers who fell to their death, suffered accidents, and were robbed of their cell phones in broad daylight.

Think "art". What comes to your mind? Is it Greek or Roman sculptures in the Louvre, or Chinese paintings? Have you ever imagined it's a dancing pattern of lights?

The artworks by American artist Janet Echelman look like colourful floating clouds when lit up at night. Visitors could not only enjoy looking at them but also interact with them literally — by using their phones to change the colors and patterns. But are they really art?

Whatever your opinion, we cannot deny art has existed for thousands of years and art and technology have always been two separate things.

Today, however, technological advances have led to a combination of art and technology, changing the art world greatly. Now art is more accessible to us. For example, people used to queue six hours but spend limited time admiring the famous 5-metre Chinese painting Along the River During the Qingming Festival. Thanks to technology, however, viewers can leisurely experience a digital version of this painting, where the characters can move and interact with their surroundings.

The art-tech combination is also changing our concepts of "art" and the "artist". Not only can we interact with art, but take part in its creation. With new technological tools at our fingertips, more people are exploring new art forms, such as digital paintings and videos. However, it has also raised questions over its overall quality. Can a video of someone slicing a tomato really be called "art"?

Similarly, such developments are making the line between art and technology less distinct. Can someone unfamiliar with traditional artists' tools really call themselves an "artist"? And is the artist the creator of the art itself, or the maker of the technology behind it?

Where technology will take art next is anyone's guess. But one thing is for sure — with so many artists exploring new possibilities, we can definitely expect the unexpected.

Parents, teachers and caregivers have long believed in the magic of storytelling to calm and comfort kids. Researchers working in pediatric (儿科) have now quantified the physiological and emotional benefits of a well- told tale.

"We know that narrative has the power to transport us to another world," says Brockington, who studies emotions and learning at Brazil's Federal University. He adds, "Earlier research suggested that stories help children process and regulate their emotions- but this was mostly conducted in a lab, with subjects answering questions while lying inside functional MRI machines. There's little research on physiological and psychological effects of storytelling in a more commonplace hospital setting."

So the investigators working in several Brazilian hospitals split a total of 81 patients aged 4 to 11 into two groups, matching them with storytellers who had a decade of hospital experience. In one group, the storyteller led each child in playing a riddle game. In the other, youngsters chose books and listened as the storyteller read them aloud. Before and after these sessions, the researchers took saliva (唾液) samples from each child, then asked them to report their pain levels and conducted a free association word quiz and analyzed samples.

Children in both groups benefited measurably from the interactions.

Those who heard stories also reported pain levels dropping almost twice as much as those in the riddle group, and they used more positive and light words to describe their hospital stay. The study demonstrates that playing games or simply interacting with someone can relax kids and improve their outlook but that hearing stories has an especially dramatic effect. "The researchers really tried to control the social interaction component of the storyteller, which I think was key," says Mar, a psychologist at York University.

People have been painting pictures for at least 30,000 years. The earliest pictures were painted by people who hunted animals. They used to paint pictures of the animals they wanted to catch and kill. Pictures of this kind have been found on the walls of caves in France and Spain. No one knows why they were painted there, Perhaps the painters thought that their pictures would help them to catch these animals. Or perhaps human beings have always wanted to tell stories in pictures.

About 5,000 years ago, the Egyptians and other people in the Near East began to use pictures as kind of writing. They drew simple pictures or signs to represent things and ideas, and also to represent the sounds of their language. The signs these people used became a kind of alphabet. The Egyptians used to record information and to tell stories by putting picture writing and pictures together. When an important person died, scenes and stories from his life were painted and carved on the walls of the place where he was buried. Some of these pictures are like modern comic strip stories. It has been said that Egypt is the home of the comic strip. But, for the Egyptians, pictures still had magic power. So they did not try to make their way of writing simple. The ordinary people could not understand it.

By the year 1,000 BC, people who lived in the area around the Mediterranean Sea had developed a simpler system of writing. The signs they used were very easy to write, and there were fewer of them than in the Egyptian system. This was because each sign, or letter, represented only one sound in their language. The Greeks developed this system and formed the letters of the Greek alphabet. The Romans copied the idea, and the Roman alphabet is now used all over the world.

These days, we can write down a story, or record information, without using pictures. But we still need pictures of all kinds: drawing, photographs, signs and diagrams. We find them everywhere: in books and newspapers, in the street, and on the walls of the places where we live and work. Pictures help us to understand and remember things more easily, and they can make a story much more interesting.

Roberto Novo has styled the hair of a lot of stars. But during COVID-19, he's turned his gifts to the heads of lesser-known, older New Yorkers- and he's done it for free.

The Argentina-born stylist welcomes them to his Manhattan apartment or visits them in their homes. His two dogs keep everyone company. He calls his project "Free haircut and puppy love."

It started last summer when he and his dogs visited a client who had been isolated (隔离) for months due to COVID-19. Seeing how happy it made her, he asked if she had friends in her apartment building who might be interested in a free hairdo.

"It doesn't get any better than that — bring some joy to senior citizens in these hard times," Novo said. "People are really suffering in this situation right now. So if I can help them with a simple haircut, that's a gift."

On a recent day, Novo and his dogs walked into Madelon Spier's apartment and quickly turned the living room into a salon (美发厅). Sitting in a black chair, Spier waited to get her hair styled. "I think he's an amazing artist. And we're all pictures that he's painting," Spier said. "There's his personality (特色), and his way of cutting — a way of looking at a person and knowing what's right for them," said Spier.

Neighbor Andrew Langerman said Novo also gave him his first haircut in months. "I've just been so lonely during COVID-19," he said, and now, "I feel a lot better. I wasn't really feeling very well when I came here but then I felt great just being with everybody. And I had a good haircut."

As Novo finished a cut, he ordered pizzas that the group later shared. They talked and laughed.

"I always tell people if I die and I'm born again, I'll do everything exactly the same way," said Novo.

Spring is just around the comer and there's nothing like seeing the first robin of the season, which is a sign that warmer days are ahead. Now a new study conducted in Germany has found that the more often we see and hear birds chirping and singing, the happier we are. A team at the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research discovered that being surrounded by a wide variety of birds can offer increasing life satisfaction equal to $150 per week of added income.

The German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research took data from the 2012 European quality of Life Survey to measure how species diversity in birds affected 26,000 people in 26 European countries.

"According to our findings, the happiest Europeans are those who can experience numerous different bird species in their daily life, or who live in near-natural surroundings that arc home to many species," explains the study's lead author, Joel Methorst a professor at Goethe University in Frankfurt. "We also examined the socio-economic data of the people that were surveyed, and, much to our surprise, we found that birds diversity is as important for their life satisfaction as is their income," he added.

Another study from the California Polytechnic University found that placing speakers with a variety of bird sounds on hiking trails improved the outdoor experience. The study was conducted in Colorado but the findings may improve hikers' happiness everywhere. There was no difference in hikers' happiness whether the bird sounds were artificial, pre-recorded, or natural.

During a year of loss, stress, and uncertainty, the comforting sounds of nature have been crucial. A recent report from the Audubon Society found that sales of bird feeders, bird food, and birding apps have all increased during the pandemic, and participation in the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's annual Global Big Day 2020 broke records.

Once upon a time, there lived a rich man. He had a servant（仆人）. He and the servant loved wine and good food very much. Each time the rich man left his home, the servant would drink the wine and eat up all the nice food in the house. The rich man knew what his servant did, but he had never caught his servant doing that.

One morning, when he left home, he said to the servant, "Here are two bottles of poison（毒药）and some nice food in the house. You must take care of them." With these words, he went out.

But the servant knew what the rich man said was untrue. After the rich man was away from his home, he enjoyed a nice meal. Because he drank too much, he was drunk and fell to the ground. When the rich man came back, he couldn't find his food and his wine. He became very angry. He woke the servant up. But the servant told his story very well. He said a cat had eaten up everything. He was afraid to be punished, so he drank the poison to kill himself.