【推荐1】Jenny was driving her six-year-old son, Tony, to his piano lesson. They were late, and Jenny was beginning to think she should have given it up. There was always so much to do, and Jenny recently helped with an operation. She was tired. The storm and ice roads added to her tension. Maybe she should turn the car around.

“Mom!” Tony cried. “Look!” Just ahead a car had lost control on the patch of ice. As Jenny tapped the brakes, the other car wildly rolled over; then crashed sideways into a telephone pole.

Jenny pulled over, stopped and threw open her door. Thank goodness she knew her job well—she might be able to help these unfortunate passengers. Then she paused. What about Tony? She couldn’t take him with her. Little boys shouldn’t see scenes like that. But was it safe to leave him alone? What if their car were hit from behind? For a brief moment Jenny considered going on her way.

She asked Tony to stay in the car and ran, slipping and sliding, toward the crash site. It was worse than she’s feared. Two girls of high school age in the car. One was killed. The driver, however, was still breathing. Jenny quickly applied pressure to the wound in the teenager’s head while her practiced eye checked the other injuries. A broken leg, maybe two, along with probable internal bleeding. But if help came soon, the girl would live.

A trucker had pulled up and was calling for help on his cellphone. Soon ambulance and rescue workers came. “Good job,” one said while examining the wounds. “You probably saved her life!” Later the families of the victims came to meet Jenny, expressing their gratitude for the help she had offered.

【推荐2】If some parts of a body are very sick or damaged, then doctors might need to remove them. Another way doctors can help is to grow new tissue to replace what is sick or damaged. This is called regenerative medicine (再生医学).

Regenerative medicine sounds like something from a science fiction movie but it is not a new idea. Inside our bones, we have something called ‘marrow’, which makes our blood and keeps us healthy. Doctors have been giving sick people the bone marrow from other healthy people for the last 30 or 40 years, and this is a kind of regenerative medicine.

Newer developments in regenerative medicine include growing new skin in a laboratory and using it to help people who have been hurt in fires or accidents. Another example of regenerative medicine is a technique developed from studying frogs and mice. When cells are old, like in adults, they can’t change what they do in our bodies. For example, a skin cell can’t change into an eye cell. But when cells are very young, they can become any cell type. These young cells are called stem cells, and doctors can use them to grow any type of tissue, such as skin, heart or eye. John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka won the 2012 Nobel Prize for their studies in this area.

Professor Fiona Watt, from the Centre of Regenerative Medicine at King’s College, London, believes that regenerative medicine is so exciting because many different kinds of experts need to work together. 3D printers may be used to print new bones by experts, who need to work closely with university scientists and the surgeons who do the operations in hospitals.

We can not yet grow new arms or legs for people, but the science fiction dream of regenerative medicine may be closer than we think. Perhaps in the future, doctors will be able to grow whole new bodies for us.

【推荐1】When we are children, the summer holidays seem to last forever, and the wait between Spring Festivals feels like an eternity. But later, we may find that the time just seems to fly by, with weeks, months and entire seasons disappearing from a blurred calendar at a fast speed. Why does time seem to pass faster as we get older?

According to the Daily Mail, our brains degrade as we get older. That diminish the amount of information we can deal with in a single day. “The human mind senses time changing when the perceived images change,” Adrian Bejan from Duke University, US, told the Daily Mail. “The present is different from the past because the mental viewing has changed, not because somebody’s clock rings.”

Infants, for example, move their eyes much more often than adults because they’re processing images at a faster rate. They deal with a large amount of information and do many things in a single day. This makes them feel like a single day lasts for a long time. However, as people get older, fewer images are processed in the same amount of time. Therefore, older people receive less information during a day than younger people. This causes things to seem as though they’re happening more quickly.

Apart from the degradation of our brains, some psychological reasons also make us experience time differently. People may measure time by the number of memorable events that can be recalled within a certain period. When we think about our youth, we may remember a life packed with first-time activities, for example, our first time traveling without our parents, or our first date. We experienced these events so vividly that time then seems to us to have passed very slowly. According to David Eagleman of the Baylor College of Medicine in the US, recalling these memories makes us feel like they took forever. Many adults find life is routine and sometimes dull. For this reason, when they look back, they might feel like there are not many exciting things to remember. Therefore, time seems to be moving faster to them.

【推荐1】These days, nobody needs to cook. Families graze on high-cholesterol（胆固醇）take-aways and microwaved ready-meals. Cooking is an occasional hobby and a vehicle for celebrity chefs, which makes it odd that the kitchen has become the heart of the modern house. What the great hall was to the medieval castle, the kitchen is to the 21st - century home.

The money spent on kitchens has risen with their status. In America the kitchen market is now worth $ 170 billion, five times the country's film industry. In the year to August 2007, the Swedish furniture chain IKEA sold over one million kitchens worldwide. The average budget for a "major" kitchen overhaul in 2006, calculates Remodeling magazine, was a staggering $ 54,000, even a "minor" improvement cost on average $ 18,000.

Exclusivity, more familiar in the world of high fashion, has reached the kitchen: Robinson & Cornish, a British manufacturer of custom-made-kitchens, offers a Georgian-style one, which would cost 145,000 to 155,000 pounds -- excluding building, plumbing and electrical work. Its big selling point is that nobody else will have it: "You won't see this kitchen anywhere else in the word."

The elevation of the room that once belonged only to the servants for the modern family tells the story of a century of social change. Right into the early 20th century, kitchens were smoky, noisy places, generally located underground, or to the back of the house, as far from living space as possible. That was as it should be: kitchens were for servants, and the aspiring middle classes wanted nothing to do with them.

But as the working classes prospered and the servant shortage set in, housekeeping became a matter of interest to the educated classes. One of the pioneers of a radical new way of thinking about the kitchen was Catharine Esther Beecher, sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe. In American Human's Home, published in 1869, the Beecher sisters recommended a scientific approach to household management, designed to enhance the efficiency of a woman's work and promote order. Many contemporary ideas about kitchen design can be traced back to another American, Chris Frederick, who set about enhancing the efficiency of the housewife. Her 1919 work, House-Engineering: Scientific Management in the Home, was based on detailed observation of a wife's daily routine. She borrowed the principle of efficiency on the factory floor and applied mystic tasks on the kitchen floor.

Frederick's central idea, that "stove, sink and kitchen table must be placed in such a relation that useless steps are avoided entirely," inspired the first fully fitted kitchen, designed in the 1920s by Mangarete Schutter Libotsky. It was a modernist triumph, and many elements remain central features of today's kitchen.

【推荐3】DNA analysis has revealed family relationships between more than 10 generations of Stone Age people at megalithic(巨石的) tombs in Ireland and Sweden.

The evidence suggests that megaliths, prehistoric large stone structures, sometimes acted as graves for family groups in northwestern Europe thousands of years ago. The latest findings throw new light on the origins and social structure of the groups that built megaliths in this region—a history that has long been hidden in mystery.

For their study, the international team of researchers analyzed the genomes—the complete set of genetic material in a cell—of 24 Stone Age individuals from five megalithic burial sites in lreland, Scotland and Gotland, a large Swedish island in the Baltic Sea.

This analysis showed that many of the individuals buried at each megalith, who all lived between 3,800 B.C. and 2,600 B.C., according to radiocarbon-dating of their remains, were closely related via family ties.

The results also showed that the individuals buried at the megaliths were related to Neolithic(新石器时代的) farmers in northern and western Europe but genetically distinct from other hunter-gatherers. This was particularly noticeable at the Ansarve site on the island of Gotland.

“The people buried in the Ansarve tomb are remarkably different on a genetic level compared to the individuals dug out from hunter-gather contexts, showing that the burial tradition in this megalithic tomb, which lasted for over 700 years, was performed by distinct groups with roots in the European Neolithic expansion,” Magdalena Fraser, co-first author from Uppsala University, said in the statement