【推荐1】NASA has a new job listing, and it’s no joke. The US space agency (机构) is looking for a “joker” to join their planned mission (任务) to Mars.

A mission to Mars is no laughing matter. On average, the red planet is 140 million miles (225 million kilometers) away from Earth. A trip there would take around eight months in a small spacecraft. And Mars has a communications delay (延迟) of 20 minutes. This means that astronauts will have to wait 20 minutes for a reply, when an emergency happens.

“When you’re living with others in a confined space for a long period of time, such as on a mission to Mars, problems are likely to occur,” Jeffrey Johnson, a scientist at the University of Florida, told The Guardian.

This is probably why NASA wants an astronaut with a sense of humor. “These are people that have the ability to pull everyone together,” Johnson said.

In stressful situations, perhaps humor is a way to know we aren’t alone. By laughing together, we share our stress. Then we can focus on our jobs instead of just worrying.

There are other examples of team “clowns”. One example is the journey to the South Pole (南极) led by Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen. It was a difficult journey, full of danger. Adolf Lindstrom, a cook at Amundsen’s team, was a “clown”. He made people laugh through the whole journey. Amundsen later wrote that Lindstrom was the most valuable member of the team.

But if you’re hoping that your favorite TV comedian (喜剧演员) will fly to Mars, that probably won’t happen.

“Being funny won’t be enough to land somebody the job,” Johnson said. “They also need to be an excellent scientist and engineer.”

Besides, they must be in top physical condition.

【推荐2】Albert was an ordinary worker in an oil company in America. His workmates gave a nickname(绰号) “Four dollars a bucket (桶)” to him, for he was always used to leaving an advertisement of his company “Four dollars a bucket of oil” below his name whenever and wherever he wrote down his name.

As time went by, people forgot his real name. Later, when Rockefeller, the board chairman of the oil company, heard of it, he was very surprised, so he invited Albert to come to his office.

“Some people give you a nickname for ‘Four dollars a bucket’. Why aren’t you angry?” asked Rockefeller with some puzzlement in his eyes.

“Oh! Mr. Rockefeller! I like this nickname very much, because ‘Four dollars a bucket’ is our company’s advertisement. As long as someone calls me ‘Four dollars a bucket’ once, I think it’s a free advertisement for our company. I have no reason to get angry. Don’t you think so, Mr. Rockefeller?”

“Oh! What a fantastic man!” Rockefeller said excitedly when hearing Albert’s words. “Young man, work harder! You must succeed in the future! I believe in you!”

Five years later, Albert became the second board chairman after Rockefeller.

Later Albert said in one of his reports, “I don’t think we should feel frustrated when we have no way to do the world-shaking things. We should treat everything actively because maybe our future success will begin from a small thing!”

【推荐3】When your children become teenagers, it’s time to start considering an after-school job.

    1    , so why shouldn’t our children? When your child has a job, he/she is responsible for getting to work on time and doing his/her job correctly. An after-school job is a good way to teach your teenager about responsibility.

By allowing your teenagers to have an after-school job you allow them to learn about money management.     2    , they will have to manage how much money they can spend. They will realize that they can’t spend every dollar they make if they want to reach their goal.

You are probably saying, “Teens will get into trouble whether they have a job or not.”

    3    . Depending on the distance from work to home, you could allow your children some extra time to get home after work. This will ensure that they don’t feel rushed but can still get home on time.

It’s a good idea to show your teenagers that hard work is what it takes to finish everything in their lives.     4    . What will they expect when they are out on their own if they have never had to work hard for what they want?

    5    . All teenagers, no matter what their parents’ financial situation is, should have a job. They will need the experience before they do get out in the real world.

【推荐2】People refer to never forgetting how to ride a bike or throw a baseball as examples of “muscle memory”, the result of a motor learning.     1     It is a phenomenon that previously trained muscles acquire strength after a period of disuse.

Previous research has shown that the changes actually persist in the muscles themselves. In one study of mice, the results suggest that after nuclei in muscle cells multiply in response to an overload of training, those extra nuclei aren’t lost during subsequent periods of inactivity. They are retained (保留), essentially waiting to be reactivated. If you fell off the fitness wagon (马车) during the pandemic, don’t be frustrated. Once you have got additional nuclei, you are banking the capacity.     2     In fact, a recent study revealed that less than eight weeks of retraining were needed to regain your former fitness. It depends on how fit you were initially, how long the layoff was, how old you are and how long you’d been exercising.

    3     It means you still have a distinct advantage when it comes to regaining your former level of fitness. And the principle applies to both resistance training and endurance training. The best way to regain your muscle memory is to start at a level below what you were accustomed to doing, and then gradually increase in terms of duration, frequency, then intensity.     4    

Ultimately, muscle memory is a payoff for all the past work you put into learning a sport.     5     You will never know how much muscle memory you may have until you start training again.

【推荐1】Is any economist so dull as to criticize Christmas? At first glance, the holiday season in western economies seems a treat for those concerned with such vagaries (奇想)as GDP growth. After all, everyone is spending; in America, retailers make 25% of their yearly sales and 60% of their profits between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Even so, economists find something to worry about in the nature of the purchases being made.

Much of the holiday spending is on gifts for others. At the simplest level, giving gifts involves the giver thinking of something that the recipient would like he tries to guess his or her preferences, as economists say - and then buying the gift and delivering it. Yet this guessing of preferences is not easy; indeed, it is often done badly. Every year, ties go unworn and books unread. And even if a gift is enjoyed, it may not be what the recipient would have bought if they had spent the money themselves.

Interested in this mismatch between wants and gifts, in 1993 Joel Waldfogel, then an economist at Yale University, sought estimate the difference in dollar terms. In a research, he asked students two questions at the end of a holiday season: first, estimate the total amount paid (by the givers) for all the holiday gifts you received; second, apart from the emotional value of the items, if you did not have them, how much would you be willing to pay to get them? His results were gloomy: on average, a gift was valued by the recipient well below the price paid by the giver.

In addition, recipients may hot know their own preferences very well. Some of the best gifts, after all, are unexpected items that you would never have thought of buying, but which turn out to be especially well picked. And preference can change. So by giving a jazz CD, for example, the giver may be encouraging the recipient to enjoy something that was ignored before. This, a desire to build skills, is possibly the hope held by many parents who ignore their children’s desires for video games and buy them books instead.

Finally, there are items that a recipient would like to receive but not purchase. If someone else buys them, however, they can be enjoyed guilt-free. This might explain the high volume of chocolate that changes over the holidays. Thus, the lesson for gift-givers is that you should try hard to guess the preference of each person on your list and then choose a gift that will have a high emotional value.

【推荐2】The biggest safety threat facing airlines today may not be a terrorist with a gun, but the man with the portable computer in business class. In the last 15 years, pilots have reported well over 100 incidents that could have been caused by electromagnetic interference. The source of this interference remains unconfirmed, but increasingly, experts are pointing the blame at portable electronic device such as portable computers, radio and cassette players and mobile telephones.

RTCA, an organization which advises the aviation (航空) industry, has recommended that all airlines ban such devices from being used during “critical” stages of flight, particularly take-off and landing. Some experts have gone further, calling for a total ban during all flights. Currently, rules on using these devices are left up to individual airlines. And although some airlines prohibit passengers from using such equipment during take-off and landing, most are reluctant to enforce a total ban, given that many passengers want to work during flights.

The difficulty is predicting how electromagnetic fields might affect an aircraft’s computers. Experts know that portable device emit radiation which affects those wavelengths which aircraft use for navigation and communication. But, because they have not been able to reproduce these effects in a laboratory, they have no way of knowing whether the interference might be dangerous or not.

The fact that aircraft may be vulnerable to interference raises the risk that terrorists may use radio systems in order to damage navigation equipment. As worrying, though, is the passenger who can’t hear the instructions to turn off his radio because the music’s too loud.