【推荐3】Entering competitions can be fun, and it’s a good way to hone（磨炼）your skills. While you can’t expect to win every time, you can increase your chances of winning with the right strategy and preparation. These are general tips that can be applied to your competition of choice.

Research and choose the right competition.     1     Choose a competition at which you’ll excel, and make sure it’s far enough in the future that you have plenty of time to train effectively. Do some research into the judges and organizers as well to see what they look for in a winning competitor.

Don’t psych yourself out. Plenty of people get scared off by a competition’s requirements and don’t enter in the first place.     2     Since you’ve done your research, you can be confident in your choice to compete and your potential to win. So, stand strong even when you have your doubts and when others may be dropping out.

Learn your competition. Remember that you’re not competing with everyone in the competition. There may be many applicants and candidates, but there will only be a few contenders（竞争者）and finalists.     3    

Make a checklist. Everyone has different productivity styles. If it helps, consider making a training checklist.     4     A checklist is what weightlifters do, for example, to keep track of the exercises they’ve done, the number of reps, and the weight. With a written checklist, you also have one less thing to think and worry about.

    5     Leave sticky notes on your mirror or car steering wheel. Write down anything motivational to keep you inspired. It doesn’t have to be specific. It can simply be, “You OWN the track today!” or “35.5 IS my time!”

【推荐3】Everyone who knew anything about animals warned me against getting a rabbit in my early 20s, but I ignored them, and ended up with three. It turns out that all the people who are against rabbits have a point: Rabbits get sick all the time, and there are very few vets who specialize in their care. My years with rabbits have been full of feeding, hurried trips to the vet, sleepless nights and begging for advice on the Internet.

Now that my animals are old and weak now, I clear their waste and clean their legs with a rabbit-friendly shampoo. I spend a lot of time on the floor, because although my rabbits are hard to satisfy socially, they also hate to be picked up.

I am often asked the question: Why rabbits? Why not a dog, or a cat? I try to describe what it’s like to be with them. I had never felt a real duty towards anything until I had my rabbits.

My answers never satisfy anyone. I’m not sure about the question, either it so often implies instrumental value, as if the correct reply might be “They make good companions” or “They’re nice to look at”. I don’t have the right kind of reason. I don’t believe in the use value of any living thing. Like humans, animals just are — that’s it. Usually we do not look at other people and think about how to make them work for us. Yet so much of our way of seeing the world is founded on the assumption that animals are meant to serve a purpose. This seems wrong.

After all these years with my rabbits, the only thing I know is that there is no lesson to be learned or value to be acquired. There’s just an effort to be made, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s what life is.

【推荐1】Flow is a cognitive (认知的) state where one is completely immersed (沉浸) in an activity — from painting and writing to yoga and surfboarding.     1       

The process of flow was discovered and coined by the Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. In the 1960s, Csikszentmihalyi studied the creative process and found that, when an artist was in the course of flow, they would insist on their task strictly, regardless of hunger or exhaustion.     2    

One of Csikszentmihalyi’s key points about flow is that a person needs to push oneself out of their comfort zone to stimulate it. Because it’s a dynamic state, one has to constantly adjust the skill level, challenge, and complexity required for the activity.     3     If your skill level goes beyond the activity, boredom will set in, which will break the state of flow.

    4     One can access flow by thinking of activities like sports, dancing and painting. We can also have a flow state experience with many of our day-to-day tasks and encounters. Watching TV and video gaming, however, are not on that list.

Flow can also be a tool for better emotion regulation (调节). When a person is in a state of flow, there is little need for doubts or anxieties about oneself or the world in general.     5     Through the process of flow, a person chooses to focus on a task and gain a sense of autonomy over time, body, and mind.

However, pushing yourself to find the flow state can backfire. In fact, trying too hard or wondering whether you are in this state in itself goes against flow. We lose the balance between tension and skill level if we concentrate too much on the task.

【推荐2】Sleeping with a dim light like a television or nightlight is enough to the raise blood sugar and heart rates of healthy people, according to a new study. Light helps our body maintain an internal clock, but artificial light at night can interrupt the rest and repair that should happen during the sleep. New research suggests that even when our eyes are closed, a small amount of light can disrupt the way our bodies normally keep our blood sugar within a healthy range.

In the study published in Sciences on Monday, scientists asked 20 participants ages 19 to 36 to spend two nights in their lab. On the first night of sleep, the volunteers slept in a very dark room. For their second night of sleep, half of the group snoozed with a small light like the glow of television at night, or streetlights through a window—and half spent their second night in a dark room.

During the trial, all participants were connected to devices that measured different markers of their sleep quality. They were each connected via a special tube, allowing researchers to collect samples without waking the individual. Researchers also recorded participants’ heart rates and brain waves.

When the volunteers awoke in the morning, the team tested their blood sugar and found that participants that slept in rooms with a dim light spent less time in deep sleep. In addition to having slightly worse blood sugar control, the group exposed to dim light had a higher heart rate on average. “By comparison, those that spend two nights in the dark room had little difference in their blood sugar control. They thought they slept well, but your brain knows that the lights are on,” says Zee, “you should clearly pay attention to the light in your bedroom. If you can’t give up your night light, keep it dim and at floor level.”

Earlier work has linked exposure to light during sleep to an increased risk of obesity in women. Zee recommends, “make sure that you start dimming your lights at least an hour or two before you go to bed to prepare your environment for sleep.”

【推荐3】A discovery of mummies in the Tarim Basin in China from the 1990s has finally been uncovered. The remains showed evidence of western origin, but after a DNA test, it turns out that these mummies are a bit more local than once thought.

The Tarim Basin is mostly covered by the Taklamakan Desert, which is dry and unlivable for human settlement. Located in central Asia, this was the location of an incredible anthropological (人类学的) find. The remains of thousands of people were discovered alongside clothes, tools, food, and other artifacts. The dry climate created a perfect setting for preservation for what is now known as a 4,000-year-old civilization.

This discovery was noted as even more of a mystery because of the western look of the clothing on the mummies and the burial practices that had never been known before-all of the remains were found laid to rest in wooden boats. This is odd due to the location of the find-the middle of the desert. Many believed that these peoples were wanderers or nomads, but genome sequencing (基因组测序) done on 13 of the mummies by Chinese, European, and American researchers showed that these remains are actually native children of an ancient ice-age civilization.

This genetic (基因的) research is only the beginning. There are still mysteries surrounding this find. “The mummies have long fascinated scientists and the public since their original discovery. Beyond being extraordinarily preserved, they were found in a highly unusual context, and they exhibit diverse and far-ranging cultural elements, ” stated Christina Warinner, an associate professor of anthropology at Harvard. The research surrounding this discovery will continue globally and with every bit of information uncovered, the more the anthropological community, as well as the public, will understand about this incredible find.