【推荐1】While training for a half-marathon last fall, Janet Sherman, 57, started noticing pain in her left foot. A diagnosis of plantar fasciitis(足底筋膜炎)led to shoe inserts and cross-training. Before long, the Wyoming-based teacher was “just good enough” to go back to training, and so she did, although she chose to drop down to a shorter 10K race distance.

On race day, Sherman’s foot began bothering her early, and by a water stop two-thirds of the way through the course, she knew she should drop out. “It was so painful, but I was stubborn and finished out the race.” she said. “Afterward, I could barely walk.”

To the inactive, Sherman’s attitude might be hard to understand. But for amateur athletes and weekend warriors, pushing through pain is a common refrain.“As a society, we are more active in sports than ever before” said Adrienne Langelier, a Texas-based sports psychology consultant.“But at the same time, as a culture we have developed a “no-days off mentality”.

That needs to change, said Mark Cucuzzella, a physician and professor at the West Virginia University School Medicine. “ʻNo pain, no gain’—no, thank you”, he said jokingly. “For too long we have beautified that way of thinking. It’s not sustainable.”

Pressing too hard can lead to injury, illness and exhaustion. With running, for instance, pushing through pain can lead to a secondary injury, said Adam Tenforde of the Spaulding National Running Center at Harvard Medical School. “A stress fracture(骨折), if you continue to run on it, may progress to a full fracture and require a much longer recovery period, for example.” He said. “I advocate for addressing pain early, rather than ignoring it”.

【推荐2】Perhaps you have seen them, those who fall asleep on the subway and then, somehow, wake up exactly at their stop. Perhaps you are one of them. How is this possible? We spoke to two doctors, who offered their insights about it.

It is possible that your body gets used to waking up at a certain point each time during your commute, said Dr. Marc I. Leavey, a primary-care specialist in Maryland. That holds especially true if you commute at the same time every day. This suggests that if you were to get on at a different time, or if the journey were delayed, your internal clock might not wake you up at your stop. It is an interesting theory, but Dr. Ronald Chervin, director of Michigan Medicine’s Sleep Disorders Centers, does not fully buy it. He is skeptical that circadian rhythms can also explain why you wake up after a brief nap.

You are also likely to wake up for your particular stop because of an oral cue, such as the conductor stating the name of the subway stop over the public-address system. Such cues alert your brain that you have arrived, explained Dr Leavey. According to a study published in the Public Library of Science, during sleep, our brain reacts differently when we hear our own name and other people’s names, noted Dr Chervin. This suggests that your brain does not turn off during sleep, which makes it possible to pick up on the announcement of your stop.

Another reasonable possibility: You may wake up at each stop, check if it is yours, and go back to sleep, all without having remembered it, added Dr. Chervin. He sees this in cases where patients are suffering from sleep apnea. They may wake up as many as 200 times during a single night, without having remembered a single instance. That’s because they fall right back asleep before their brain has time to process their experience into long-term memory. Similarly, you could be waking up every time you hear a new stop called. But you just don’t remember such instances even after you fully come awake for your stop—leading you to believe that you have slept the whole way through and miraculously woken up at the right time.

【推荐3】Flying over a desert area in an airplane, two scientists looked down with trained eyes at trees and bushes. After an hour’s flight one of the scientists wrote in his book, “Look here for probable metal.” Scientists in another airplane, flying over a mountain area, sent a message to other scientists on the ground, “Gold possible.” Walking across hilly ground, four scientists reported, “This ground should be searched for metal.” From an airplane over a hilly wasteland a scientist sent back by radio one word: “Uranium.”

None of the scientists had X-ray eyes: they had no magic power of looking down below the earth’s surface. They were merely putting to use one of the newest methods of locating minerals in the ground…trees and plants as signs that certain minerals may lie beneath the ground on which the trees and plants are growing.

This newest method of searching for minerals is based on the fact that minerals deep in the earth may affect the kind of bushes and trees that grow in the surface.

At Watson Bar Greek, a brook (小溪) six thousand feet high in the mountains of British Columbia, Canada, a mineral search group gathered bags of tree seeds. Boxes were filled with small branches from the trees. Roots were dug and put into boxes. Each bag and box was carefully marked. In a scientific laboratory the parts of the forest trees were burned to ashes and tested. Each small part was examined to learn whether there were minerals in it.

Study of the roots, branches, and seeds showed no silver. But there were small amounts of gold in the roots and a little less gold in the branches and seeds. The seeds growing nearest to the tree trunks had more gold than those growing on the ends of the branches.