【推荐3】Some people wake up before the sun rises above, go for a run and eat a healthy breakfast, all before many others get out of bed. Waking up that early might sound tiring to late risers, but can a night owl (夜猫子) become an early bird?

“It is possible to make the change, but it’s not easy,” said Michelle Drerup, director of behavioral sleep medicine at the Cleveland Clinic. “A true night owl doesn’t really feel great early in the morning when they wake up, especially when they’re starting to change this.”

A person’s tendency to be a night owl, early bird or some kind in between is known as their chronotype (生物钟). Depending on that, people are likely to be more awake during certain times of the day and sleepier during others. It is determined by a combination of nature and life style, scientists have found.

If you want to wake up earlier, make the change gradually. Drerup recommended slowly setting your wake-up alarm earlier by 15 to 20 minutes every few days over the course of several weeks until you’re adjusted to your schedule. Sticking to it is the key.

“Limit exposure (接触) to light in the hour before bed, such as by staying away from screens,” Drerup said. Light blocks the body's production of melatonin (褪黑色素) which is thought to set our circadian rhythm (昼夜节律). And in the morning, try to get exposure to light as soon as you wake up, to end melatonin production. Avoid exciting activities late in the evening. Instead of exercising at night, try working out in the morning or afternoon. You may also need to change your meal times to earlier time in the day.

If being a night owl works for you, there is actually no need to change your sleep schedule. But staying up late becomes a problem when you must wake up early for work and school. It can also increase your risk of developing health.

【推荐1】In recent years, the number of young adults returning to their parents’ homes after leaving has risen. This is the Boomerang Generation, becoming independent only to return to their parents’ homes like boomerangs. A boomerang is a curved(呈弯曲状的) stick that, when thrown in a particular way, comes back to the person who threw it.

One of our family members had a college roommate who dropped out(辍学) and went back to her parents because she was unable to wash her clothes. This is quite a funny example, but stories like these are plentiful. The dropout and many other young adults are often short of basic life skills, so they move out of the family home for a time and then boomerang right back.

We believe having more real-life learning in high school may solve young adults’ inability to become independent. This can be achieved through simply including extra Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills requirements for life skills. The TEKS would include learning about taxes(税), banking, health, voting(选举), job interviews, cooking, and many other important skills.

These areas of study happen to go with required courses. For learning how to do taxes, we would want to include a TEKS in math classes. In an economics class, we would require students to learn about banking and housing. In history class, students would have to learn about the importance of voting. In English class, students could learn about jobs. Cooking would be added to health class.

If in high school we can teach these skills, graduates going to college or trade school won’t need to worry about their living skills and can focus on their education. More students can finish their studies and get degrees. And once out of college or trade school, young people can focus on their jobs and responsibilities as adults. Thus jobs will be done better, people will better understand their role in society and be better rounded as both students and individuals(个人).

【推荐3】Every year thousands of people are crowded in the city of Pamplona, in north eastern Spain, for the opportunity to run for their lives as six fighting bulls are released to charge through the town. There are dozens of injuries every year, and there have been at least 15 deaths recorded since 1910. Daniel Parisi, a physicist and computer scientist realized that the Pamplona bull-runs offered the perfect natural experiment to research the insight of the psychology of panicked crowds.

Dr. Parisi and his team went to two different rooftop locations in Pamplona in July 2019, and recorded footage (镜头) of the runners as the animals were released. A wave of people running at top speed raced past their cameras a few seconds ahead of the bulls. The researchers brought their recordings back to the lab to calculate the speed of the runners, the density (密度) of the crowd and the probability of a runner tripping and falling. They also examined the tracks of the bulls, the responses of individual runners as the bulls came near to them, and the relationship between runner-group density and speed.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the researchers found that runners picked up speed when the bulls drew near. Less expected was the finding that the speed of individual runners increased with the density of the crowd This finding is at odds with a long-held assumption in architectural and urban-design circles that people will slow their pace as group density goes up, in order to lower the risk of a collision, which could lead to a fall and, perhaps, injury or death as a runner is trampled by others.

It seems that, in the heat of the moment, people pay little attention to the danger of colliding with each other, and do not slow down. The duty falls upon urban designers to work out how best to plan the construction of future alleys, tunnels, bridges and other passages that restrict flow. The only option may well be to make them wider.