On a Sunday morning in 2008, Vic Gundotra received a call during a religious service. It was from Steve Jobs, Apple’s former CEO. He didn’t answer, but Jobs left a message saying he had something urgent to discuss. Gundotra returned his call almost immediately.

“Hey Steve—this is Vic,” he said. “I’m sorry I didn’t answer your call earlier. I was in religious services and the caller ID said ‘unknown’, so I didn’t pick up.”

Steve laughed, saying, “Vic, unless the caller ID said ‘GOD’, you should never pick up during services.”

Vic Gundotra laughed nervously. Although Steve used to call him during the week when he was upset about something, it was unusual for him to call on Sunday and ask him to call his home. He was worried what had happened.

“Vic, we have an urgent problem. I’ve already asked someone from my team to help you, and I hope you can fix this tomorrow,” said Steve. “I’ve been looking at the Google logo on the iPhone and I’m not happy with the icon (图标). The second O in Google doesn’t have the right yellow color. It’s just wrong and I’m going to have Greg fix it tomorrow. Is that OK with you?”

The CEO of Apple, who revolutionized personal computers, the way we listen to music and the way we think of mobile devices, was worried about the yellow in the second “O” in Google.

Needless to say the problem was fixed, and Vic Gundotra said it taught him a lesson on leadership and attention to detail.

“It was a lesson I’ll never forget,” said Gundotra. “CEOs should care about details. Even shades of yellow. On a Sunday.”

Valentina is 9 years old living in Plano, Texas with her parents. She loves Beatrice, an American Girl doll (洋娃娃) very much. But Valentina left her beloved doll behind by chance during a flight earlier this summer. Rudy and Dominguez, Valentina’s parents, tried everything they could to reunite their daughter with her best friend, Beatrice.

“Beatrice means a lot to me. She brings me happiness and she’s my best friend,” Valentina said. “When she was missing, I felt like my heart was broken.”

When finding Beatrice was lost, the Texas family immediately searched everywhere for the lost doll with brown hair, including their travel bags, without success. They remembered seeing her on the plane so they called the airline (航空公司), and then sent an email to it.

The family also spread the message about the lost doll on the Internet — a message that finally reached pilot James, a first officer for American Airlines who lives not far from Plano.

James said he got the chance to help young Valentina locate (定位) Beatrice, who was last seen on July 20 on a plane in Tokyo, where the family had a stopover (中途停留) on their flight back home from Bali, Indonesia.

James said he got in touch with the Airlines’ Lost and Found at Haneda Airport in Tokyo and was able to locate the missing doll after two tries. He then took photos with Beatrice in various airports and on flights as he carried her back home to Valentina in Plano, over 5,800 miles away. One Monday, James drove to the Texas family to return Beatrice to Valentina in person. They were all moved for what James had done.

A common claim states that a sheet of paper cannot be folded in half more than seven times. But is this true?

In 2002, Britney Gallivan, then a junior in high school in Pomona, California, folded a single piece of paper in half 12 times. She currently holds the Guinness World Record for the most times to fold a sheet of paper in half.

The prompt that led Gallivan to accomplish these feats was an extra-credit challenge in math class to fold anything in half 12 times. Her teacher asked the students to fold something thicker: a piece of paper.

Gallivan said “it was very frustrating, as I had many unsuccessful attempts at trying to fold different papers in half. I began to question if folding paper in half more than eight times could be impossible.” However, Gallivan recalled. “I knew I needed to understand what was limiting the folding progression.”

The equations that Gallivan came up with calculated how many times a sheet of paper could be folded. She found that in order to fold many times, a long thin sheet is needed — the more a sheet is folded, the thicker the resulting stack becomes, and once the stack becomes thicker than it is long, there is nothing left to fold. She ultimately set her record with a sheet of tissue paper she found online that was 4,000 feet (1,219 meters) — more than three-quarters of a mile, or over a kilometer — long, Guinness World Records noted.

“Working on the problem took a tremendous amount of time and effort,” Gallivan said. “As frustrating as it was at times, I learned an immense amount from the experience, which has been valuable to me throughout my life in more capacities than one would expect.”     

Since Gallivan set her record, others have made claims of folding a sheet of paper more than 12 times. Still, “I anticipate that my current record will be surpassed,” Gallivan said.