【推荐1】We all know the saying, “Nobody is perfect.” It has been planted in our brains since we were children, and of course, it is the truth. So if nobody is perfect, why do we have such a hard time admitting when we are in trouble or need help?

Like many other young people trying to get through their first year of college, I felt anxiety, and it had its grips on me pretty tight. It began getting in the way of my life, and I had to sit down and tell myself that my behavior was not healthy and there was a solution. Finally, I decided to turn to therapy (精神疗法).

Therapy. It has such a negative stigma (污名), but why ? Does going to therapy mean that you are failing as a person or that you cannot fix your problems on your own? No. Going to therapy means that you are strong enough to recognize that something inside your head is not working correctly, and you are brave enough to try to fix it.

After a couple of weeks, many parts of my life became so much clearer. I began to understand that I, myself, am my worst enemy, which was pretty frightening. But, although frightened, I knew that it was only I who could guide me towards feeling better, and that was extremely empowering.

I have been guided towards a healthier mindset, one that is positive and powerful. I have been able to understand that no matter what happens in my life. I will always be okay.

A lot of people do not understand that it is normal to have negative feelings and sometimes to feel like we have lost control over certain parts of our lives. Seeing a therapist can greatly change your way of thinking about something if you keep your mind open and I am so thankful that I decided to go and do something for myself.

If you are in need of help, you can go to therapy and then everything will be okay.

【推荐2】Growing up, I was an extremely reserved(腼腆的) boy. I didn't have many friends in primary and middle school and rarely opened up to anyone. I didn't even ask my teacher questions in class. I was scared of the world and the people around.

As a child, I was scared to do anything without my parents mainly because I was afraid that I would do it badly. I was getting good grades and was well-behaved, but I wasn't happy. It was my belief that I was, for some reason, unable to do the things the others kids could do. I felt inadequate.

While in my second semester of college, I ran into some information on the Internet about something called social anxiety. I didn't really know much of the disorder. Thus I began to read about some of the symptoms and realized that social anxiety was the thing that hurt me so much.

It is common knowledge that people with social anxiety experience nervousness in social situations. What a lot of people don't know is that one of the main causes of social anxiety is negative thinking. People having a negative idea of themselves often think that they are ugly or stupid.

I realized what I was truly afraid of: not being good enough. I was afraid that people would look at me and would not like what they saw; I was scared of rejection. To help deal with these problems, I began to practice meditation(沉思) and other mindfulness exercises. My mind slowly began to change.

I realized that everyone, from star athletes to noble prize winners, experiences fear in their lives. Whether people are afraid of heights, planes, spiders, or talking to girls, we all experience anxiety and fear. There is no reason for anyone to feel excluded(排除在外的) because something scares them. People with anxiety disorders might have "problems", but there is nothing wrong with them as people. They are just as humans as everyone else.

【推荐1】“Most episodes (经历) of absent—mindedness—forgetting where you left something or wondering why you just entered a room—are caused by a simple lack of attention,” says Schacter.” You’re supposed to remember something, but you haven’t encoded it deeply.”

“Encoding,” Schacter explains, “is a special way of paying attention to an event that has a major effect on remembering it later. Failure to encode something properly can create annoying situations. If you put your mobile phone in a pocket, for example, and don’t pay attention to what you do because you’re involved in a conversation, you’ll probably forget that the phone is in the jacket now being hung in your wardrobe (衣柜).” “Your memory itself isn’t failing you,” says Schacter. “Rather, you didn’t give your memory system the information it needed.”

Lack of interest can also lead to absentmindedness. “A man who can recite sports statistics from 30 years ago, says Zelinski, “may not remember to drop a letter in the mailbox.” Women have slightly better memories than men, possibly because they pay more attention to their environment. And memory depends on just that.

“Reminders can help prevent absent-mindedness,” says Schacter. “But be sure the reminder is clear and available.” If you want to remember to take medicine with lunch, put it on the kitchen table—don’t leave it in the medicine chest and write yourself a note that you keep in a pocket.

Another common episode of absent-mindedness: walking into a room and wondering why you’re there. Most likely, you were thinking about something else. “Everyone does this from time to time,” says Zelinski. The best thing to do is to return to where you were before entering the room, and you’ll be likely to remember.

【推荐2】Every woman dreams of receiving a huge, sparkling and priceless diamond. Now scientists have discovered the largest diamond in the universe.

But it’s well beyond the reach of the most lovestruck men — 50 light years to be precise. Space scientists revealed that they had discovered a ten billion trillion trillion carat gem. Measuring 2,500 miles across and weighing five million trillion trillion pounds, the rock was found on Valentine's Day buried in the core of a white dwarf star in the constellation Centaurus.

“It’s the mother of all diamonds,” said Travis Metcalfe, who led the team of researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics in America.

“You would need a jeweller’s loupe the size of the Sun to grade this diamond.” Named Lucy, after the Beatles' song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, the rock has sent a ripple of excitement through the scientific world.

The largest diamond found on earth was the 3,106-carat Cullinan. It was cut into nine major stones, including the 530-carat Star of Africa, now a part of the Crown Jewels. Diamonds were first discovered in India more than 2,800 years ago. The Ancient Romans believed that the stones were splinters of stars that had tumbled to earth.

In Ancient Egypt, diamonds were symbols of eternity and were used in funeral rites. In the Middle Ages, men wore them to symbolize their courage and virility. The tradition of giving them as love tokens dates from 1477, when Archduke Maximilian of Austria gave a diamond ring to Mary of Burgundy.

【推荐3】There have been many headlines in recent years about the potentially negative impacts sports can have on athletes’ brains. However, a study by Northwestern University (NU) showed that in the absence of injury, athletes across a variety of sports, including football, basketball and hockey, have healthier brains than non-athletes.

The researchers examined the brain health of 495 Northwestern student athletes and 493 citizens. They delivered speech syllables to study the participants through earbuds (耳塞) and recorded the brain’s activity with scalp electrodes (头皮电极). They analyzed the ratio of background noise to the response to sound was relative to the background noise.

Athletes have a better ability to bring down background electrical noise in their brain to better process external sounds, such as a teammate yelling or a coach calling to them from the sidelines.

“No one would argue against the fact that sports lead to better physical fitness, but we don’t always connect brain fitness with sports,” said Senior author and profess Nina Kraus. He likens (比喻) the phenomenon to listening to DJ on the radio. “Think of background electrical noise in the brain like static (天电干扰) on the radio,” Kraus said. “There are two ways to hear the DJ better --- minimize the static or increase the DJ’s voice. We found that athletes’ brains use the first way to hear the ‘DJ’ better. A serious commitment to physical activity is beneficial to the nervous system, and perhaps, if you have a healthier nervous system, you may be able to better handle injury or other health problems.”

“The findings could motivate athletic interventions for those who struggle with hearing processing. In particular, playing sports may offset the excessively noisy brains often found in children from low-income area,” Kraus said.

【推荐1】Technology usually distracts us from nature. But now technology is “offering us an opportunity to listen to nonhumans in powerful ways, reviving our connection to the natural world,” wrote professor Karen Bakker in her new book, The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals.

All around the animal kingdom, there are sounds that we struggle to pick up and understand. Elephants, for example, communicate with each other using infrasound (次声波), a sound frequency far below our human hearing range. Coral (珊瑚) in the ocean also communicates with each other through sound waves, with one purpose being to attract baby coral to areas where it can successfully grow. This is a shocking fact as coral doesn’t have any ears! Scientists have placed listening devices in these environments to pick up sounds humans are normally unable to detect.

After the sounds are recorded, AI is then able to determine their meaning, according to the news website Vox. There are now whole databases of whale songs and honeybee dances. Bakker wrote that one day this information could be turned into “a zoological version of Google Translate”. One animal language Bakker wrote about is that of the elephant. She explained how elephants “have a different signal for honeybee, which is a threat, and a different signal for human,” in an interview with Vox. “Moreover, they distinguish between threatening humans and non-threatening humans,” she said.

Technology can not only understand the animals, but also communicate back to them. For example, bees use dances to communicate to their peers where to go in search of nectar(花蜜), A research team in Germany, therefore, plugged the bee language AI database system into a robot bee, allowing the robot to create a dance routine that can tell the bees which direction to move, Vox reported. Whereas in the past language creation had been limited to mainly apes(类人 猿), with there being many examples of chimpanzees(黑猩猩) having been taught sign language to communicate with humans, this new technology now allows humans to socialize with different animals throughout the animal kingdoms.

【推荐2】The Earth is facing a climate crisis, but it’s also getting greener. According to a new research, the rise is largely because of China and India. A study by NASA, based on extensive satellite imagery, has revealed that the two countries with the world’s biggest populations are also responsible for the largest increase in green plants.

A third of the leaf increase is attributable to China and India, due to the implementation of major tree planting projects as well as a vast increase in agriculture. “China and India account for one-third of the greening, but contain only 9% of the planet’s land area covered in vegetation — a surprising finding, considering the large populations in the countries need much land,” Chi Chen, the study’s lead author said in a statement.

Between 2000 and 2017, a NASA sensor gathered data of the Earth’s surface from aboard two satellites, the Terra and the Aqua. Using the data, researchers discovered that China is the source of a quarter of the increase in green leaf area, despite possessing only 6. 6% of the world’s vegetated area. Forests account for 42% of that increase, while croplands make up a further 32%. China’s increase in forest area is the result of forest conservation and expansion programs, established to combat the impacts of climate change and air pollution.

Rama Nemani, a researcher at NASA’s Ames Research Center, said in a statement, “When the greening of the Earth was first observed, we thought it was due to a warmer, wetter climate from the added carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, leading to more leaf growth in northern forests, for instance. Now, with the data, we see that humans are also contributing,” Nemani said. “This will help scientists make better predictions about the behavior of different Earth systems, which will help countries make better decisions about how and when to take action.”

【推荐3】Northeastern University in Northeast China's Liaoning Province said it will remove 52PhD students who failed to finish their studies within the permitted study period. One often has been studying for their PhD for 18 years and another two for 17 years, according to an announcement made by the university's College of Information Science and Engineering on Tuesday.

The students were admitted to the college from 2002 to 2012, a list on the college's official website showed. About 78 percent of them have been studying for their PhD at the college for over a decade. The study period for doctoral students in the university is three years, however, and the maximum length of schooling is six years with suspensions included, according to the management rules of the university.

Chinese universities have been seen clearing those postgraduate or PhD students who fail to graduate at the correct time in recent years. Xidian University in Xi'an of Northwest China, for example, removed 33 PhD students in August, some of whom had been studying for 15 years. Yanbian University in Northeast China's Jilin Province announced on November29, 2019, that it would delist 136 graduate students, including 14 PhD students.

A staff member of the university said that some of the students left without telling the school or going through the correct procedures. The difficulties in PhD study and the improving requirements for academic achievements have been found to be the main reasons resulting in students dropping out, experts said. Yang Liu, an associate professor who graduated with a PhD four years ago from a key university in Shanghai, told the Global Times that it is not strange for some PhD students to drop out under the strict academic review process. He also said that some may be scared off by the economic pressure of long-term schooling.