【推荐3】On the day the tornado(龙卷风) hit, there was no sign fierce weather was on its way— the sky was blue and the sun had been out. The first warning my husband, Jimmy, 67, and I, 65, got came around 9 p.m., from some text on the TV Jimmy was watching. He ran upstairs to find me in our third-floor bedroom, and we changed the channel from the national television to our local Pensacola, Florida, station.

Soon the tornado was on top of us. It was the loudest thing I have ever heard. The bones of the house shook, and the power went out. And the wind began to roar(咆哮) through the house, most likely through blown-out windows and the door to our garage. Everything was moving. And the back wall of the house came off and flew into the darkness outside. We had three flights of steps to get to the storeroom down there, the relative safety of the first floor.

I didn’t know how or if we would make it down the steps. It felt as if there were no floor underneath me as the wind lifted me off my feet. As we finally reached the last flight of steps, our front door blew out. Suddenly, a three-foot-long tree branch flew over our heads, missing us by inches.

By the time I reached the storeroom, the tornado had been over us for about a minute. Jimmy pushed me down to the storeroom floor, but he couldn’t get inside himself because of the wind. I held Jimmy’s arm as the tornado blew the door open. My knees were full of glass, but I felt no pain. If I had let go, Jimmy would have flown right out the back of the house.

All of a sudden, Jimmy lifted off his feet. I thought he was gone. And then everything stopped. He landed on his feet. In those first quiet moments, I couldn’t believe it was over. Our neighbor says the storm lasted four minutes. In that time, four of the twelve town houses in our unit were completely destroyed. Amazingly, none of us were seriously injured.

【推荐1】In the 1966 science-fiction film The Fantastic Voyage, a team of scientists and doctors are shrunk to microscopic size injected into the body of an injured man to save his life. The tiny crew travels through the body's dangerous environment to locate and repair the damaged part of the man's body. Eventually, the group manages to complete their task and the man awakens, fully cured.

Such an idea sounds extraordinary to many, But what if it were possible to cure a disease like a cancer, using tiny particles injected into a person to find the cancer and destroy it without harming anything else in the body? Although it may seem like science fiction, tools like this are now being developed and may become common in the near future—thanks to research currently being done in the field of nanotechnology.

Nanotechnology（纳米技术）is really small. The prefix "nano" refers to a nanometer, which is one-billionth of a meter. A comma on a page of a book or magazine may be more than half a million nanometer. Using this technology, it will be possible to detect cancer at a stage when there are perhaps only a thousand bad cells. Compare this to what happens today: doctors can diagnose cancer only after the dangerous cells have multiplied into millions and developed a tumor. One of the advantages of detecting and treating cancer is that the cells is less likely to be resistant to drug treatment. Right now, most cancer treatments kill not only the dangerous cells but the healthy ones as well. Nanoparticles will allow doctors to attack cancerous tumors without disturbing healthy cells. Thus, it can deliver cancer-killing drugs to the cancer cells and allow doctors to deliver cancer treatment earlier, faster, and more thoroughly.

Unfortunately, there are serious concerns that these same materials could have negative environment and health effects. In recent studies, fish exposed to water containing large amounts of nanoparticles suffered brain damage. And people are at risk as well. But many scientists don't think research into its many uses should be stopped.

Meanwhile, research into the uses of nanotechnology in health and other fields continues. "What's amazing is how quickly this is evolving", says chemist Vicki Colin. "even ten years ago, a lot of these applications would have seemed pretty unrealistic. "Perhaps, the old movie, The Fantastic Voyage, isn't so hard to believe after all.

【推荐2】For years, there has been a prejudice against science among clinical psychologists (临床心理学家). In a two-year analysis to be published in November in Perspectives on Psychological Science, psychologists charge that many clinical psychologists fail to “provide the treatments which are given the strongest evidence of effectiveness” and “give more weight to their personal experiences than to science.” As a result, patients have no guarantee that their “treatment will be informed by science.” Walter Mischel of Columbia University is even cruder in his judgment. “The disconnect between what clinical psychologists do and what science has discovered is an extreme embarrassment,” he told me, and “there is a widening gap between clinical practice and science.”

The “widening” reflects the great progress that psychological research has made in identifying the most effective treatments. Thanks to strict clinical trials, we now know that teaching patients to think about their thoughts in new, healthier ways and to act on those new ways of thinking are effective against depression, panic disorder and other problems, with multiple trials showing that these treatments—the tools of psychology—bring more lasting benefits than drugs.

You wouldn’t know this if you sought help from a typical clinical psychologist. Although many treatments are effective, relatively few psychologists learn or practice them.

Why in the world not? For one thing, says Baker from the University of Wisconsin, clinical psychologists are “Very doubtful about the role of science” and “lack solid science training”. Also, one third of patients get better no matter what treatment (if any) they have, “and psychologists remember these successes, believing, wrongly, that they are the result of the treatment.”

When faced with evidence that treatments they offer are not supported by science, clinical psychologists argue that they know better than some study that works. A 2008 study of 591 psychologists in private practice found that they rely more on their own and colleagues’ experience than on science when deciding how to treat a patient. If they keep on this path as insurance companies (保险公司) demand evidence-based medicine, warns Mischel, psychology will “discredit itself.”

【推荐1】Have you seen the movie Coco? What about Finding Nemo? Did you watch The Incredibles? These movies may seem different, but they actually share a lot in common. For starters, they were all made by an animation studio called Pixar.

How can one studio make movies that everyone loves? The secret: Pixar tells stories that audiences of all ages and backgrounds can connect with.The most important part of any Pixar movie is the story itself.

Storytelling is an art and a skill. Pixar creators know this. They have put a lot of time and thought into what makes a great story. One Pixar storyboard artist named Emma Coates created a list called "The 22 Rules of Storytelling According to Pixar. These are the rules that all Pixar stories must follow in order to be called a good story.

One rule is that "You admire a character for trying more than for their successes. In Finding Dory, Dory isn't a perfect character. She finds it hard to remember things. She makes silly mistakes, but never stops trying to find her parents. This makes her the hero of her story. If you have ever tried hard for something, you can relate to Dory

Why are the stories that Pixar tells important? They get the audience to feel the story Feelings of anger, fear, sadness, joy, and love are universal. In this way, Pixar's stories have the power to show audience members that we are more alike than different. Because we can connect with the characters' emotions, we can connect with each other

The stories that Pixar tells are very creative. No two movies are the same! But the stories and, more importantly, the feelings in each are universal. Even though we, ve never traveled the the power of these stories inspires us. They push us to better understand each other and to seek out our own adventures

【推荐2】With hospitals and nursing homes tending to thousands of patients every year accidents can and do happen. These incidents whether they are through carelessness or otherwise, can leave patients feeling powerless. That’s not the case.

“There is growing public awareness. People are feeling they have more rights and they have tools in hand to make a complaint,” said Ralph Montano, spokesman for the California Department of Public Health, which regulates hospitals and long-term care facilities in the state.

That department received more than 6000 complaints about hospitals in 2007; in the most recent year statistics are available. The complaints can be about mixed-up lab results, medicine errors, foreign objects left in a patient during surgery or a host of other topic.

Similarly, the California department of Aging received 43,000 nursing home complaints in 2014. Some said patient abuse or neglect of patients; others reported missing items. And some commented on the quality of the food.

But finding the channels through them to put forward a complaint can be tiring and time consumption. Many consumers simply don’t bother, and some become lost in the system. Whether the complaint is against a hospital or a long-term care facility, the process is similar—and many people can help, including the facility’s staff, insurance company representatives and state regulators.

If you want to make a complaint while in the hospital, Patti Harvey, vice president of quality and patient care services for Kaiser Permanente in Southern California, recommends talking with the bedside nurse. If that doesn’t work, you can talk with other people higher in the chain of command, up to the hospital administrator. If the problem isn’t still taken care of—say you disagree with your treatment plan or have a problem with your doctor—member service offices at each hospital can help address your concerns.

【推荐3】Cold weather during winter months may keep many people from leaving home and running in the open air. However, a new study shows that the drop in temperature is a good reason to run. In fact, researchers say, running in cold weather helps improve one’s performance.

Many people say running in the winter can be difficult because of low temperatures and bitter winds. Yet many runners might find it easier than running in hot weather. That could be because lower temperatures reduce stress on the body. When you run in cold weather, your heart rate and the body’s dehydration (脱水) levels are lower than in warmer conditions. The body needs less water on a cold day than in warm weather.

This information comes from sports scientists at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas. John Brewer is a professor of applied sport science at St. Mary’s. For this study, he and other researchers put a group of people into a room they called an “environmental chamber”. The researchers then recreated summer and winter weather conditions in the room, under which the test subjects (接受试验者) were asked to run 10 kilometers. Brewer says he and his team recorded biological measurements of the runners.

“We’ve got a group of subjects into the environmental chamber, we’ve changed the conditions to replicate the summer or winter and we’ve got them to run 10 kilometers under both of those conditions and taken various measurements on each runner while they’ve been completing their 10 kilometers.”

Brewer says every movement runners make produces heat. He explains that one way in which we lose heat is by sweating. The body loses heat through droplets of sweat. He says the body also loses heat by transporting blood to the surface of the skin.

【推荐1】Would a faster reading speed mean that we could learn more? Some people claim that it’s possible. In July last year，the six-time speed reading champion Anne Jones sat down to read Harper Lee’s Go Seta Watchman. Just 25 minutes and 31 seconds later, she finished it--- which equals a reading rate of around 3100 words per minute. Jones runs training courses teaching speed reading, recall and concentration techniques and there are numerous speed reading apps that have appeared on the market over the past few years. But do they actually work?

First, we need to understand how we read. The human eye movement system is central to our reading ability. Read over that sentence again, and think about how your eyes scan across the words. They don't move smoothly over them. Instead, they make a series of short, sharp jumps, skipping over a few characters before briefly landing on a word. The movements are known as saccades(扫视)and the pauses are called fixations.

Reading isn't just about seeing the words---you need to comprehend them to build up a picture about what the text means. People are able to get through a block of text faster, but at the cost of accuracy and understanding. In other words, you use a speed reading app, then you'll probably get the gist(主旨) of a piece of text, but you'll struggle to recall details about what you’ve just read.

So, does speed reading work? Well, yes and no. It really depends on what you’re reading and why you need to read it. As yet, there isn't a trick that enables you to read a piece of text both quickly and accurately-there's always going to be a trade-off.

【推荐2】Unless you are like Nasty Gal’s founder Sophia Amoruso, the passwords you use to access your email and the endless other accounts you need for work aren’t filled with intention. With increasing security requirements, it’s likely your word/number combinations are becoming even less memorable. But new research suggests it may not be long before you won’t need to memorize passwords.

“Brainprint”, published in Neurocomputing, reveals that the brain’s reaction to certain words could be a unique identifying code — like a fingerprint — that could eventually replace passwords.

In a small experiment, the researchers measured the brains’ signals of 45 volunteers as they read through a list of 75 acronyms such as FBI and DVD. The word-recognition response differed so much between each participant that a second experiment using a computer program could identify each one with 94% accuracy.

It’s not enough to feel totally secure, but promising enough to hint at the future of securing sensitive information.

The advantage of using such a biometric system (生物识别系统) is that it can be used for continuous verification (验证), New Scientist points out. Passwords or fingerprints only provide a tool for one-off identification. Continuous verification could in theory allow someone to interact with many computer systems at the same time or even with a variety of intelligent objects, without having to repeatedly enter passwords for each device.

As Hollywood has illustrated, it’s simply a matter of cutting off a finger to steal that person’s identity. “Brainprints, on the other hand, are potentially cancellable,” said Sarah Laszlo, assistant professor of psychology and linguistics at Binghamton University and co-author of the study, “So, in the unlikely event that attackers were actually able to steal a brainprint from an authorized user, the authorized user could then ‘reset’ their brainprint.”

Until now, brain signals have been a challenge to understand. This experiment leaped over the obstacle by focusing on the brainwaves from the specific area that reads and recognizes words. The signal is therefore clearer and easier to measure.

The problem, so far, is that the brain signal is still not as accurate as scanning someone’s fingerprint, and initially requires sticking diodes (二极管) on your head in order to get a read. That’s ok, according to Zhanpeng Jin, assistant professor at Binghamton University and coauthor of the study, because brainprint isn’t going to be mass-produced any time soon. He says the researchers foresee its use at places such as the Pentagon, where the number of authorized users is small, and they don’t need to be continuously verified the way you do to access your mobile device or email.

Better keep your memory sharp, at least a little while longer.

【推荐3】Each night, small groups of a species called free-tailed bats emerge from their habitat in the Panamanian rain forests to hunt for the prey （猎物）using echolocation.

“When bats are hunting, especially when they're in open areas, they produce two really different call types. They have their ‘search-phase calls’ when they're just scanning the environment. And then they have ‘feeding buzzes’ when they actually detect food, like insects. ” said Jenna Kohles, a graduate student at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Germany.

Both types of calls are typically too high-pitched for us to hear. Other bats can hear those feeding buzzes and use them as a hint for finding food. But it's always been assumed that the other call, search-phase call, doesn’t include that kind of social information. Kohles and her team wondered if search-phase call might also be social and help bats stick together in the dark.

“This is why we then tested first whether these echolocation calls they produce when they’re scanning the environment contain information about a bat’s identity, like in the form of an individual signature. And then, more importantly, we wanted to test whether bats can actually use this information to tell between different individuals, just using these search-phase echolocation calls.”

The researchers captured wild bats and exposed them to a particular call over and over again until they became bored and stopped reacting. Then the researchers played the same type of call but recorded from a different bat. If the bats reacted, it means that they noticed that the identity of the caller had changed.

And that's exactly what happened, which suggests that some kind of individual signature is encoded （编码）within search-phase call. The results are in the journal Behavioral Ecology.

Many other animals that hunt in groups use vocalizations （发声）to keep connected. But bats already invest most of their vocal resources in echolocation for hunting. So it appears that these bats have figured out how to accomplish both tasks-hunting and cooperation-using a single type of vocalization.