【推荐1】The power of sleep

While no one knows exactly why you sleep, it's clear you can't live without it. Your brain needs sleep to help you pay attention, think of new ideas, and remember what you learn.     1     If you don't get enough seep, a school assignment that's normally easy may feel impossible, or you may feel clumsy playing your favorite sport.

    2     Each stage has unique brainwaves that can be measured during a brain test called an EEG （脑电图）. Sleep stages repeat throughout the night in 90-minute cycles.

Non-rapid eye movement （NREM） sleep

Stage 1: Light sleep. In this phase, your body gradually relaxes and brainwave activity starts to slow down. If you wake up now, you may not even know you were asleep at all.

Stage 2: True sleep. In this phase, your breathing and heart beat get slower, but waking up is still easy.

Stage 3: Deep seep. In this phase, your blood pressure and body temperature drop slightly.     3    

Rapid eye movement （REM） sleep

This stage comes after stage three and gets its name from the flickering （来回移动的） eye movements that occur here.     4     An EEG shows a brainwave pattern similar to waking. This is the dreaming stage. It's also the stage that helps you remember what you learn.

Darkness and dim （昏暗的） lights increase production of a powerful brain chemical （melatonin） that makes you feel tired and sleep through the night. But sunshine and bright lights block melatonin production to help you wake up and stay active all day.

Sleep tip:     5     A dim nightlight is fine, but even the light from digital screens can make it hard to fall asleep.

【推荐2】If you stand in front of a group of kids, and start stating facts and ideas about a particular topic, like common trees found in a forest, eyes will probably glaze over. There might be a few people with a particular interest in trees who remain attentive, but it’s likely that most will lose interest fairly quickly. But if you stand up in front of that same group of people and tell them a story, something different will happen.

Researchers have now quantified the emotional benefits of a well-told tale. “We know that stories can transport us to another world,” says Guilherme Brockington, the lead author of the new paper. Earlier research suggests that stories help children process and regulate their emotions—but it was mostly conducted in a laboratory, with subjects answering questions while lying inside MRI machines. There are few studies on psychological effects of storytelling in more commonplace scenes, such as hospitals.

So investigators working in several hospitals split a total of 81 patients aged between four and eleven into two groups, matching them with storytellers who had a decade of hospital experience. In one group, the storyteller led each child in playing a riddle game. In the other, youngsters chose books and listened as the storyteller read them aloud. Before and after these sessions, the researchers let each child spit into a tube, then asked them to report their pain levels and conducted a free-association word quiz.

Based on the analysis of each tube of saliva(唾液), the researchers found children in both groups showed lower levels of the stress-related hormone(荷尔蒙) called cortisol and higher levels of oxytocin, a feel-good hormone. However, the cortisol levels of kids in the storytelling group were a quarter of those in the riddle group, and their oxytocin levels were nearly twice as high. Those who heard stories also reported pain levels dropping almost twice as much as those in the riddle group, and they used more positive words.

Next, the investigators plan to study how long these effects last. For now Brockington says the results indicate storytelling is a low-cost and extremely efficient way to help improve health outcomes.

【推荐3】“We thought dogs would behave like children under age 5, but now we guess that perhaps dogs can understand when someone is dishonest,” says Huber at the University of Vienna in Austria. “Maybe they think, ‘This person has the same knowledge as me, but is giving me the wrong information.’ It’s possible they could see that as intentionally misleading, which is lying.”

Once that trust was established, the team had the dogs witness another person move the food from the first to the second bowl. The communicators were either in the room, and also witnessed the switch, or were briefly absent and so apparently unaware that the food had been switched. In either case, the communicators would later recommend the first bowl, which was now empty.

In previous versions of this experiment with children under age 5, the participants reacted in particular ways. They would typically ignore the communicator who gave honest but misleading advice on where the food was. However, if the communicator had been in the room and witnessed the switch, but still recommended the first (now empty) bowl, young children were actually much more likely to follow the communicator’s knowingly misleading suggestion.

This may be because the children and non-human primates (灵长类) trusted the communicator over the evidence of their own eyes, says Huber.

The dogs in the new experiment, however, weren’t so trusting of lying communicators, much to the researchers’ surprise, says Huber. Half of the dogs would follow the communicator’s misleading advice if the communicator hadn’t witnessed the food switch. But about two-thirds of dogs ignored the communicator who had witnessed the food switch and still recommended the now-empty bowl. These dogs simply went to the bowl filled with food instead. “They did not rely on the communicator anymore,” says Huber.

【推荐2】In my generation, most people assume. We assume that after getting a driver’s license, we should see a brand new car sitting in our driveway. We assume that the latest iPhone product should be in our hands as soon as something goes wrong with our old one. We also assume that college, being as expensive as it is, is given. However, what we don't realize is that all of these things are very special privileges.

New cars, the latest technology and college fees are something that most people have in the place where I live. I' m not necessarily complaining about this. I live in a very fortunate area, and I try to remind myself of that every day.

Getting nice things is great, but sometimes, the competition that rules our lives gets too fierce. When someone else gets something great, you begin to think, "Why can't I have that?" When everyone around you goes to college, you think that one day you will obviously do the same, because who doesn’t?

Even now, being almost done with my first year of college, I constantly see people who forget why we're here, and how lucky we are to be on this campus. All of the distractions can surely keep you from doing your best, and they can easily make you forget your real purpose at college. The parties, friends, events, and overall social life can move you into a never-ending whirlpool (旋涡) of not doing schoolwork. Having fun is a part of life, but balance is the key when it comes to college.

Appreciation nowadays is slowly fading into a distant thought. We constantly forget how lucky we are to have the things and the life that we do. Surely, who doesn’t dream of a new car waiting for them, or that brand new iPhone that you see in all of the commercials? But wanting something is different from expecting it. Setting yourself up with an "I should get this" attitude will only push appreciation further away.

Appreciate what you have, but don't expect what you don't have. Say thank you to those who help and support you, and realize that whoever you are, you' re lucky in a great way.

【推荐3】A huge 42 percent of marriages in the UK end in divorce, he highest rate in Europe. What is happening in the UK to cause such a phenomenon? Many consider the family to be the basic building block of society. If marriages and families are falling apart, is the UK society also falling apart? Is the UKs cultural identity breaking down? The UK of today is one of the most multicultural countries on earth. There are exotic sights and sounds on the street comers of every British city. British cuisine is now one of the most diverse around. Everyone speaks with a different accent.

Is such diversity a good thing? Well, it makes the UK a very exciting place to live in. There are new ideas everywhere. There is great freedom to be who you want to be, and most people will not criticize you for who you are. Yet such freedom seems to come at a cost. Some British people regard ethnic minorities (少数民族) as coming to the UK to steal jobs. When the economy does badly, this feeling increases as unemployment rates rise. So, it could be argued that the breakdown of marriages in the UK is in some part because of the pressures put upon families by wider problems in British society. Many people become stressed when those problems arise, and that can then make their family life unhappy as well.

Another possible reason for the high divorce rate might be that marriage no longer has the same value or meaning for British people as it once did. Church attendance in the UK has been falling for the last 50 years, suggesting fewer people consider marriage a holy thing. Since 1991, there has been a drop of 50 percent in people getting married in church rather than a register office.

Then there is the financial side . In the past, married couples paid lower government taxes than single people. That tax incentive (激励) policy, which used to reduce a couples tax by up to 500 in a year, has now disappeared, making the cost to keep a marriage higher.

However, the 42 percent UK divorce rate isn’t the highest rate in the past forty years! Meanwhile, some measures are being taken to strengthen marriage in the UK by the government.