【推荐2】When the sand began kicking up and hitting our faces, I started to worry that maybe we had made a mistake.

That afternoon, my dad had stood on the deck（露台）of our home and laughed as our neighbors packed up their cars and headed inland. They left to spend the night in motels or at friends’ homes that were out of range of approaching summer storm.

Challenging the weather that threatened to damp our spirits, we lit a fire on the beach. Dad told jokes and we had a good time. When it was 6:30 p.m., all laughter disappeared. Our eyes were drawn to the sky. A tornado（龙卷风）was headed straight for us! In a flash, we were all on our feet. The wind started screaming and now we were running to the cottage. My mom stopped next to the front door. “Where can we go?” She shouted at my dad.

Most cottages on this part of Lake Michigan had been built without basements. Ours was no exception. The huge windows and the cottage itself wouldn’t offer safety from high wind.

“Follow me!” my dad yelled. We crawled（爬）beneath the deck, pressing ourselves against the foundation of the cottage. Between the deck supports, we watched the approaching storm in silent terror.

My dad shouted, “Hold on!” and something else I couldn’t hear over the screaming wind. I think he was praying. By the time it reached our cottage, it was nothing more than a strong wind. The rest of the storm lasted for an hour and then simply blew away.

“Next time, we’ll stay inland at Grandma’s. Okay?” my dad said.

【推荐3】“Earthquake!” The word flashed in my brain. A roaring sound filled my ears. I tried to slide beneath my desk. The desk did a wild tap dance, slipping and sliding towards the centre of the room. I twisted my body and grabbed at the windowsill behind me, somehow kicking free of my dancing chair. I tried to stand. My legs skated away as if on a bucking escalator.

My fingers shook, grasped and held the windowsill tightly. Somewhere through the roar sounded the terrified scream of some wounded animal. I looked behind me and tried to steady my gaze on the other kids but the scene was a dizzy nightmare. Some of the class were sitting in the middle of the room, surrounded by chairs and desks. One girl was screaming. A boy was trying to claw his way across the floor to the door in a crazy overarm crawl.

My grip froze me to the windowsill.

I cried aloud, “I’m going to die. I’m going to die. Save me. I’m not ready to die. I’m not ready!”

I hunched forward on my knees and pressed my face against my clenched (紧握的) fingers. I looked at the backs of my fingers and stupidly noticed the fragile pale hairs growing out of the pores. The fingers would soon cease to exist. Somehow the impending horror of my death was too terrible to even cry about.

Suddenly, I became aware that the rocking had ceased. Perhaps I wasn’t going to die.

【推荐1】Pinocchio may be just a children’s story, but Spanish scientists at the University of Granada recently investigated the so-called “Pinocchio effect” and found that our noses don’t grow longer when we tell a lie, but actually get a little bit smaller.

Dr. Gómez Milán and his team developed a lie detector test that used thermal (热成像的) cameras to tell if people were lying, and found that whenever participants in their research were being untruthful, the temperature of their nose dropped up to 1.2℃, while the temperature of their forehead increased up to 1.5℃. They also found that drop in temperature at nose level actually caused it to become slightly smaller, although the difference could not be seen by the human eye. “One has to think in order to lie, which raises the temperature of the forehead,” Dr. Gómez Milán explained the findings. “At the same time we feel anxious, which lowers the temperature of the nose.”

For this study, researchers asked a number of 60 students to perform various tasks while being scanned by thermal cameras. One of these tasks involved making a 3-to-4-minute call to their parents, partners or friends and telling an important lie. Participants had to make up the lie themselves during the call, and the thermal cameras picked up this “opposite Pinocchio effect” caused by the changes in temperature in the nose and forehead.

Interestingly, the thermal lie detector picked up the temperature difference in 80 percent of test participants, which is a better rate of success than that of any modern lie detector used by the police. “With this method we have increased accuracy and reduce the chances of ‘false positives’, something that is frequent with other methods,” said Dr. Gómez Milán, who added that police could one day combine other lie detection technology with their technology to achieve better results.

【推荐3】Bill Gates’ body might live in the present, but his brain lives in the future. He has made a career out of predicting what will happen in matters of computing, public health and the environment. He correctly predicted the rise of smartphones and social media, and his latest predictions could come true, too. Here’s what Gates predicts for the future of our world.

In his Annual Letter 2015, Gates made the prediction that Africa’s agriculture industry would increase productivity by 50% by 2030. Now the continent buys about $50 billion worth of food from other countries each year, although 70% of people in Africa are farmers. “In the next 15 years，however，creations in farming will solve the food problem in Africa,” Gates wrote. “The world has already developed crops that are more productive; with all the technologies, African farmers could possibly double their harvests.”

By 2035, there could be almost no poor countries. In his Annual Letter 2014, Gates bravely predicted that continued levels of foreign help could mean there would be almost no more poor countries by 2035. “Almost all countries will be what we now call lower-middle income or richer,” Gates explained. “Countries will learn from their most productive neighbors and benefit from things like better seeds and the digital revolution. ”

By 2030, the world will discover a clean-energy breakthrough to power our world. One of Gate’s more hopeful predictions which came in 2016 said that wind, solar, or some other renewable resources would power most of the world within 15 years. “The difficulty we face is big, perhaps bigger than many people imagine,” he wrote in his letter. “But so is the chance to make things better.” Many of the poor countries he visited had no running water or electricity. At night this meant they couldn’t light or power their homes, and keep businesses open.” If the world can find a type of cheap, clean energy, it will do more than prevent climate change,” he wrote. “It will change the lives of millions of the poorest families.”