【推荐1】Driving is one of those necessary skills that you should possess if you wish to survive as one of "the fittest" in the modern life. You can start learning to drive when you are eighteen, the legal age. Experience tells that the older you become, the harder it is to learn driving.

However, learning to drive will be the very last thing on your mind when you graduate out of a university, and will be desperate looking for a job and stressing out on how to clear your student debt. So, the best way is to start out early on your path to take driving lessons. Many of the teens in recent times decide not to drive. By this, you are really missing out on a huge part of growing up and losing out on a whole lot of benefits. The top reason for not learning driving is the relatively high costs of driving lessons. But, we are here to tell you why you should overlook the costs and rather concentrate on the advantages.

No need for public transport. Using public transport to get to any destination quickly is anything but convenient. If you know how to drive, you will never have to rely on public modes of transportation ever again. Relying on a bus or train to arrive smoothly on time rarely ever happens.

At times you aren't or can't be relying on public transportation. Those are the times you are probably relying on a friend, or your parents for a ride. Knowing how to drive yourself will make you independent and you wouldn't have to fit your plans according to other peoples’ schedules.

In the recent job world, there may be plenty of jobs out there which won't mark you as a qualified candidate because you don't know how to drive.

These are the main benefits that knowing how to drive could bring into your life. So start going to a driving school as early as possible.

【推荐2】While it may seem that a cab driver has only one responsibility—to drive customers to and from certain destinations, this is not the case. Instead, a cab driver must be ready to take on a number of different tasks.     1     Taxis have been around in various forms for many centuries, and the many duties of a cab driver increase as time goes on.    2     Not only do cab drivers have to pick up all kinds of people, but many of them have to interact with their customers. Frequently, cab drivers are hired by tourists or business people for an entire day, and this can mean making unavoidable contact with different people with different personalities.

Taxi drivers must also be able to operate different types of vehicles.     3    The vehicles have ramps (斜面) that can be raised and lowered. This type of vehicle requires a special license that most cab drivers must get before obtaining   a position as a taxi driver.

Generally, cab drivers are not required to repair vehicles.     4     For example, almost all taxi drivers know how to change tires（轮胎）, lights, and other small vehicle parts. Many drivers are also responsible for checking the taxi on a regular basis.

Perhaps the most important task that a cab driver must be aware of is how to charge a customer for each trip. While the prices of some trips have been predetermined（商定）, such as airport fares, other trips must be calculated using taximeters（计价器） and fee charts.     5    

【推荐1】A team of engineers at Harvard University has been inspired by nature to create the first robotic fly. The mechanical fly has become a platform for a series of new high-tech systems. Designed to do what a fly does naturally, the tiny machine is the size of a fat housefly. Its mini wings allow it to stay in the air and perform controlled flight tasks.

“It’s extremely important for us to think about this as a whole system and not just a bunch of individual components (零件),” said Robert Wood, the Harvard engineering professor who has been working on the robotic fly project for over a decade. “The added difficulty with such a project is that actually none of those components are off the shelf and so we have to make them all on our own,” he said.

They engineered a series of systems to start and drive the robotic fly. “The seemingly simple system which just moves the wings has a number of individual components, each of which individually has to perform well, and then has to be matched well to everything its connected to,” said Wood. The flight device was built into a set of power, computation, sensing and control systems. Wood says the success of the project proves that the flying robot with these tiny components can be built and manufactured.

Wood says the design offers a new way to study flight mechanics and control at insect-scale. Yet, the power, sensing and computation technologies on board could have much broader applications. “You can start thinking about using them to answer open scientific questions, you know, to study biology in ways that would be difficult with the animals, but using these robots instead,” he said. “So there are a lot of technologies and open interesting scientific questions that are really what drives us on a day-to-day basis.”

【推荐2】Rivers are the veins of the Earth, transporting the water and nutrients (营养物) needed to support the planet’s ecosystems, including human life. While many nutrients are essential to the survival of life, there is one element transported by water in rivers that holds the key to life and to the future of our planet — carbon.

Carbon is everywhere and understanding the way it moves and is either released or stored by the Earth system is a complex science in itself. Carbon starts its journey downstream when natural acid rain, which contains carbon dioxide from the atmosphere,   melts minerals in rocks. This helps transform carbon dioxide to bicarbonate (碳酸氢盐) in the water that then flows in our rivers. This is a very long process, which is one of the main ways carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere. Carbon is transported by rivers to oceans and once that carbon reaches the ocean, it is stored naturally in deep sea sediments (沉淀物) for millions of years.

As carbon travels down a river, different processes may impact whether it continues to flow downstream or whether it is released into the atmosphere. For example, human engineering, like extensive dam construction, will result in dramatic changes to how water and sediments travel down the river. Some carbon that fails to reach the sea may return to the atmosphere in some way, which causes more warming.

Earth’s climate is closely related to the carbon cycle. We all know about the essential role of plants in consuming carbon dioxide, but do we know enough about rivers? Changing the chemistry and the course of rivers may have significant impacts on how they transport carbon. Remember: wherever we live, we all live downstream.

【推荐3】Yawning is something we all do -- maybe because we're bored carrying out boring tasks or because we're tired. Sometimes, just seeing other people yawn can set you off. But is this biological function really contagious, and why do we do it in the first place?

Many of us think we open our mouths when we yawn to take in more oxygen, but in fact it appears there is no clear biological reason. According to BBC Bitesize, new research suggests it might be because yawning cools the brain down and prevents it from overheating, much like the fan in your laptop. This might be why we're more likely to feel sleepy and yawn in warm temperatures.

What is clear is that we yawn more when we're exhausted and ready for a nap, and we can't control when we do it -- once we start, there's no stopping us! But it's also true that yawning is a very contagious behavior. John Drury, a researcher from Sussex University found in his research that there is a connection with our social group and how close we are to the people in it. If we identify with the person who exhibits the behavior, we are likely to copy it too.

Another research by the University of Nottingham in 2017 found similar results. They asked volunteers to watch other people yawn. They found their ability to resist yawning when others around them yawned was limited. And the urge to yawn was increased when people were told they couldn't. They also found, when using electrical stimulation, that they were able to increase people's desire to yawn. These findings, they say, could be useful in treating other conditions like Tourette's, which involve the same area of the brain.

What is certain is that a yawn can creep up on us at any time even when we think we're not tired --but, I hope, not when you're reading this article!