Vincent van Gogh (1853—1890) is one of the most popular of the Post-impressionist  painters. He is famed for the great vitality of his works which are characterized by expressive  and emotive use of brilliant color and energetic application of impastoed ( 厚原料的 ) paint. Below are some famous pictures painted by Vincent and the poetic lyrics to Don McLean’s hit  song Vincent (Starry, Starry Night) in the famous cartoon film Loving Vincent. 

       The deadly crash in Arizona involving an autonomous vehicle operated by Uber  Technologies Inc. brings public attention to a pedestrian-safety problem that is setting worse in an era of constant smart phone use and an increase in dangerous driving. Pedestrians were  victims of about 15% of traffic fatalities ( 意外的死亡事故 ) in 2017, with about 6,000  pedestrian deaths representing a level not seen in 25 years, according to a report released last  month. More broadly, regulators are expecting a sudden rise in traffic deaths that follows a  decade-long improvement in highway safety. The association estimates pedestrian fatalities rose  27% from 2007 to 2016, a period during which the broader traffic-fatality number was mostly  falling. Overall fatalities, however, have been rising as well in recent years as drivers deal with  increasing distractions in their cars and Americans put more miles on their vehicles during the  period of a strong economy and low gasoline prices. 

       Companies like Uber, General Motors Co. and Alphabet Inc. are developing driverless cars,  partially motivated by the potential for fewer car accidents. These companies say computerpiloted vehicles will make better decisions than those operated by humans. In the Uber accident  on Sunday night, the driverless car hit and killed a woman crossing the street. The incident is  still under review, and Uber has said it is cooperating with investigators. 

       Russ Martin, director of government relations for the Governors Highway Safety  Association, said, “There has been an increase in both the number of people walking and  driving, leading to more exposure for pedestrians, not to mention that more and more people are  using smart phones both while driving and walking.” 

       Meanwhile, drinking driving continues to be a problem, and there has been a rise in  drugged driving. In traffic accidents in which fatally injured drivers were tested for drugs, the  detection rate was 43% in 2015, compared with 28% in 2005. 

       The time of day and where a pedestrian is walking appear to be factors. In 2016, 75% of  pedestrian fatalities occurred after dark and more than 70% occurred in travel lanes away from  intersections. 

       Research is being done to reduce the number of people struck by cars. Pilot programs are  under way in certain states to study how various factors—from stoplights to speed limits to car  design—might contribute to accidents. 

       Missy Cummings, a professor of mechanical engineering and material science at Duke  University, has cautioned Congress on the risk of rushing to promote self-driving vehicles  on public roadways. She is studying ways to alarm pedestrians via an application that an autonomous car is about to cross their path. She is also doing tests to determine whether  pedestrians are likely to act differently in the presence of self-driving vehicles. “It’s unlikely  people will change behavior whether or not a car has wonderful technology on it. If people  are willing to walk out in front of the road and think the car will stop, they will still do that in  front of an autonomous car. If the technology is degraded, we could have a situation like what  happened in Arizona.”

       A new study showed that unless you truly know how your fish is supposed to taste, you  might be eating the wrong thing one-third of the time due to mislabeled packaging.

       The report by Oceania collected more than 1,200 samples from 674 shops in 21 states.  DNA testing showed that of these samples 33 percent of the time, the food was labeled  incorrectly. 

       According to the report, snapper ( 鲷鱼 ) were mislabeled 87 percent of the time and tuna  ( 金枪鱼 ) 59 percent. Shockingly, the report found 113 of the 120 red snapper samples were  something, other than what they claimed to be. 

       The mislabeling problem is not entirely new. In 2011 the investigation found customers  were often being sold cheaper varieties of fish under the guise ( 伪 装 ) of it being a more  expensive type. 

       “I think it comes down to a restaurant or chef who’s trying to buy something cheaper and  make it more appealing and call it something else,” said Darren, owner of Kushi Izakaya &  Sushi. But not everyone thinks this mislabeling is being done on purpose to cheat customers.  The Washington Post reported chef Bob saying, “It’s not dishonesty. It’s carelessness.”        

       Mislabeling is not only a money issue. There are some fish that for health reasons people  might want to avoid eating. Our government has a responsibility to provide more information  about the fish sold in the U.S., as seafood frauds harm not only consumers’ wallets, but also  ever vendor and fisherman cheated in the process—to say nothing of the health of our oceans. 

       But the Washington Post noted that agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric  Administration, which have the ability to test sea fish DNA, don’t have their members devote  more time to this effort. FDA conducts tests on less than 1 percent of U.S. sea food. 

       This doesn’t mean that amelioration to the system isn’t underway. Here’s more effort being  conducted. Some are pushing for reforms that would make it harder for chefs, restaurateurs  and distributors to mislead the public. Some government officials and companies urge each fish  receive an ID number, allowing buyers and customers to see where it’s caught by logging onto a  website. 

       Steve Vilnit, fisheries marketing director said, he has been talking with the state’s  fishermen about whether they would adopt such a system. “Chefs are willing to pay a little more  for that level of detail,” Vilnit said, “We’ll probably start out working with a small group of  guys and expand it from there.” Similarly, the FDA approved DNA-bar coding of fish last year  to help fight the mislabeling problem as well.

       It’s no secret that many children would be healthier and happier with adoptive parents than  with the parents that nature dealt them. That’s especially true of children who remain in abusive  homes because the law blindly favors biological parents. It’s also true of children who suffer for  years in foster homes because of parents who can’t or won’t care for them but refuse to give up  custody ( 监护 ) rights. 

       Fourteen-year-old Kimberly Mays fits neither description, but her recent court victory could eventually help children who do. Kimberly has been the object of an angry custody battle  between the man who raised her and her biological parents, with whom she has never lived. A  Florida judge ruled that the teenager can remain with the only father she’s ever known and that  her biological parents have “no legal claim” on her.

       The ruling, though it may yet be reversed, sets aside the principle that biology is the  primary determinant of parentage. That’s an important development, though not so much in  time. 

       Shortly after birth in December 1978, Kimberly Mays and another infant were mistakenly  switched and sent home with the wrong parents. Kimberly’s biological parents, Ernest and  Regina Twigg, received a child who died of a heart disease in 1988. Medical tests showed  that the child wasn’t the Twiggs’ own daughter, but Kim only was, thus causing a custody  battle with Robert Mays. In 1989, the two families agreed that Mr. Mays would continue to  have custody with the Twiggs getting visiting rights. Those rights were ended when Mr. Mays  decided that Kimberly was being harmed. 

       The decision to leave Kimberly with Mr. Mays caused people to debate her suit. But the  judge made clear that Kimberly did have rights to make a decision on her own behalf. Thus he  made clear that she was more than just possession to be handled as adults saw fit. 

       Certainly, the biological link between parent and child is important. But biological parents  aren’t always preferable to adoptive ones, and biological parentage does not convey an absolute  ownership that cancels all the rights of children.

       I watched from a distance as the homeless man quarreled with those who did not leave  money for him—the majority. 

       I walked up to him and right on queue he asked me for a quarter. “I’ll give you a quarter  if you tell me your story.” He laughed, “You’ll give me a quarter for my story?” I lay the  quarter in front of him and corrected myself— “Nah, here’s the quarter but it would be nice to  hear your story.” I followed his eyes to the quarter and for a brief moment I saw a glimmer of  reflection. I sat down next to him and waited.

       “I was in the army,” he said. “I was a sniper ( 狙击手 ) and was supposed to shoot down  the enemy from the distance.” I listened carefully to his grizzly voice as he went deeper into the  story. He wore dirty old torn clothes and smelled like a dead rat left in a mouse trap. He told me  how he used to hunt with his family and was really good at it. He had his own way of respecting  animals by not wasting what he killed for food and not killing more than he needed. When the  army came knocking on his door, he felt proud and joined up. All those years of polishing his  hunting skills could now serve a larger purpose—to defend us from the bad guys. He set out to  fight in Iraq. 

       It wasn’t long before he realized his ideals and expectations were just a shadow of the  truth. He became disillusioned with the killings, which he felt were of innocent people. “I was  a sniper but I never really killed anyone,” he said. “One day I had to do it. They asked me to  shoot this lady from the distance. I saw kids near that lady and my hands were on the trigger.  Man, I was tearing up... I couldn’t do it. She wasn’t doing anything to anyone and she was with  the kids—I couldn’t see through my tears. It just didn’t make any sense to me.”   

     The story goes on as he describes eventually being put into prison for 180 days for refusing  to follow orders. He told me how he was black listed so that he couldn’t get a job. All the rights we take for granted were taken away from him. Why? Here was a man who was being  punished—and for what? For refusing to kill the lady? For being a hero? “I have no regrets,” the homeless man said. “I may be homeless now, but I never killed that lady. I never killed  anyone in the army. It didn’t feel right. I didn’t go there to do that. I went there to save people.” He continued, “I can live with being homeless—that’s okay. But I wouldn’t be able to live with  killing innocent people.” 

       On that lonely Friday night, I met a hero. It just never occurred to me that a hero could be a  smelly old man left on streets.

       Smile! It makes everyone in the room feel better because they, consciously or  unconsciously, are smiling with you. Growing evidence shows that an instinct for facial  mimicry ( 模 仿 ) allows us to empathize with and even experience other people’s feelings.  If we can’t mirror another person’s face, it limits our ability to read and properly react to  their expressions. A review of this emotional mirroring appears on February 11 in Trends in  Cognitive Sciences. 

       In their paper, Paula Niedenthal and Adrienne Wood, social psychologists at the University  of Wisconsin, describe how people in social situations copy others’ facial expressions to create  emotional responses in themselves. For example, if you’re with a friend who looks sad, you  might “try on” that sad face yourself without realizing you’re doing so. In “trying on” your  friend’s expression, it helps you to recognize what they’re feeling by associating it with times  in the past when you made that expression. Humans get this emotional meaning from facial  expressions in a matter of only a few hundred milliseconds. 

       “You reflect on your emotional feelings and then you generate some sort of recognition  judgment, and the most important thing that results in is that you take the appropriate action— you approach the person or you avoid the person,” Niedenthal says. “Your own emotional  reaction to the face changes your perception of how you see the face in such a way that provides  you with more information about what it means.”

       A person’s ability to recognize and “share” others’ emotions can be prevented when they  can’t mimic faces. This is a common complaint for people with motor diseases, like facial  paralysis ( 面瘫 ) from a stroke, or even due to nerve damage from plastic surgery. Niedenthal  notes that the same would not be true for people who suffer from paralysis from birth,  because if you’ve never had the ability to mimic facial expressions, you will have developed  compensatory ways of interpreting emotions. 

       People with social disorders associated with mimicry or emotion-recognition damage, like  autism ( 自闭症 ), can experience similar challenges. “There are some symptoms in autism  where lack of facial mimicry may in part be due to limitation of eye contact,” Niedenthal says. 

       Niedenthal next wants to explore what part in the brain is functioning to help with facial  expression recognition. A better understanding of that part, she says, will give us a better idea of  how to treat related disorders

       Happiness looks different for everyone. For you, maybe it’s being at peace with who you are.  Or having a secure network of friends who accept you unconditionally. Or the freedom to pursue  your deepest dreams.__(66)A few adjustments to your regular habits can help you get there. 

      Smile more often. You tend to smile when you’re happy. __(67)We smile because we’re  happy, and smiling causes the brain to release dopamine, which makes us happier. That doesn’t  mean you have to go around with a fake smile on your face all the time. But the next time you   find yourself feeling low, crack a smile and see what happens. Or try starting each morning by  smiling at yourself in the mirror. 

      __(68)You arrive for an appointment with 10 minutes to spare. What do you do with that  time? Pick up your cellphone to scroll through social media? Worry about the busy week you  have ahead of you? __(69) At the start of each month, make a short list of happy memories or  things you’re looking forward to on a small piece of paper or on your phone. When you find  yourself waiting for a ride, standing in line at the grocery store, or just with a few minutes to  kill, break out the list. 

       Face stress head-on. Life is full of stress, and it’s impossible to avoid all of them. There’s  no need to. It’s said that stress isn’t always harmful, and we can even change our attitudes  about stress. Learn more about the upside of stress. For the stress you can’t avoid, remind  yourself that everyone has stress—there’s no reason to think it’s all on you. __(70)Instead of  letting yourself get overwhelmed, try to face the stress head-on. This might mean starting an  uncomfortable conversation or putting in some extra work, but the sooner you handle it, the  sooner the pit in your stomach will start to shrink.