【推荐3】A new study shows that eating nuts and peanut butter may help prevent one form of the disease diabetes (糖尿病). Adult-onset or Type Two diabetes affects about 135 million people around the world. The disease results when the body cannot produce or use a substance called insulin (胰岛素). Insulin is produced in the organ (器官) called the pancreas. Insulin helps turn sugar in foods into energy.

The Journal of the American Medical Association published the findings. Scientists from the Harvard University School of Public Health in Cambridge, Massachusetts completed the research. They studied more than 83,000 women for 16 years. The women were 34 to 59 years old. None of the women had diabetes, cancer or heart disease when the study began. During the study, more than 3,000 women developed diabetes.

The women answered questions every four years between 1980 and 1996. The researchers asked what they ate, including information about nuts and nut products. Some of the women ate nuts five days a week. The size of each serving weighed about 30 grams. Or, they ate a serving of peanut butter five days each week. Other women in the study did not eat nuts or peanut butter. Those who ate nuts five times a week were more than twenty percent less likely to develop Type Two diabetes than the women who did not eat nuts.

Although the study involved only women, the researchers believe eating nuts would also be good for men. The scientists say more research is needed to confirm the findings. But the study suggests that the fats in nuts may improve the way the body makes and uses insulin.

Nuts contain magnesium, which helps balance insulin and levels of sugar in the blood. The fats in nuts also may improve the body’s ability to process sugar in the blood. People who suffer from diabetes have too much sugar in their blood and urine, the body’s liquid waste.

【推荐1】Roald Dahl was a spy, an ace fighter pilot, a chocolate historian and a medical inventor. He was also the author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, The BFG, and a treasury of original, evergreen, and beloved children's books. He remains for many the world's No. 1 storyteller.

Born in Llandaff, Wales, on 13th September 1916 to Norwegian parents, Harald Dahl and Sofie Magdalene Hesselberg, Dahl was named after Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian who had been the first man to reach the South Pole just four years earlier. A heroic start in life.

Wanting the best for her only son, his mother sent him to a boarding school—Repton, a renowned British public school. With schooldays happily behind him, Dahl's lust for travel took him first to Canada, then to East Africa, where he worked for an oil company until the outbreak of World War II. He enlisted in the Royal Air Force at 23 years old. In 1953 Roald Dahl married the American actress, Patricia Neal, with whom he had five children.

There followed a burst of literary energy as his endless creativity led to one wonder after another：in 1961 James and the Giant Peach was published in the US, followed by Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Fantastic Mr. Fox was published in 1970, the year before the film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was released. The rest of the decade saw the publication of many other classics, including Danny the Champion of the World, The Enormous Crocodile, and My Uncle Oswald.

Roald Dahl died on 23 November 1990, aged 74. He was buried in the parish church of St. Peter and St. Paul in Great Missende — the Buckinghamshire village where today The Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre continues his extraordinary mission to amaze, thrill and inspire generations of children and their parents.

【推荐3】Madeleine L’ Engle died more than ten years ago, but her work lives on in the more than 40 books she published. Last month, L’ Engle’s granddaughters, Lena Roy and Charlotte Jones Voiklis, published Becoming Madeleine, a biography of the legendary author. “We wanted to do something to honor her memory,” Roy said.

L’ Engle was born on November 29, 1918. Her father was a writer. Young Madeleine watched him writing, absorbed in his creation of stories—real and fictional—and saw that it gave him both pleasure and disappointment. When L’ Engle was 11, her parents dropped her off at boarding school and left her there. Although the experience was challenging, L’ Engle later said that “it helped me become a writer”. In 1959, L’ Engle began to write A Wrinkle in Time, which won the 1963 Newbery Medal.

Roy is also the author of the novel Edges. Edges was much harder to write than Becoming Madeleine, Roy noted. “Edges was my ‘learning how to write’ experience,” she said. “There was just so much I didn’t know.”

Roy added that working with her sister on their biography was very meaningful. “We don’t have competition or fighting between brothers and sisters anymore,” she joked.

The biographers focus their story on L’ Engle’s childhood. That is the period about which their 11-and 12-year-old selves would have been the most curious. “I’m so interested in how people become who they are,” Roy said. “What are all the experiences? Her becoming Madeleine has been part of me becoming Lena.”

Roy got valuable writing advice from her grandmother. “There is always a message of hope in her writing,” Roy said, “and she believes that books should end on a positive note.”

Roy, in turn, has her own advice for ambitious writers. “Keep writing,” she said. “Read as much as you can. In writing and reading, we develop sympathy because we step into somebody else’s shoes. Read as much as you can about other cultures. Have experiences with people who are different from you. Don’t be afraid.”