【推荐1】“Belittle” was first used by Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States.

Many years ago, a French naturalist, Comte de Buffon, wrote some books about natural history. The books were a great success even though some critics did not like them.

Thomas Jefferson did not like what Comte had said about the natural wonders of the New World. It seemed to Jefferson that Comte spoke of the natural wonders in America as if they were unimportant.

This troubled Thomas Jefferson. He, too, was a naturalist—as well as a farmer, inventor, historian, writer and politician. He had seen the natural wonders of Europe. To him, they were no more important than those of the New World.

In 1788, Thomas Jefferson wrote about his home state, Virginia. While writing, he thought of its natural beauty and then of the words of Comte de Buffon. At that moment, Jefferson created a new word—belittle. He said, “Comte de Buffon believes that nature belittles her productions on this side of the Atlantic.”

Americans had already accepted Jefferson’s word and started to use it. In 1797, the Independent Chronicle newspaper used the word to describe a politician the paper supported. “He is a great man,” the paper wrote. “So let the opposition try to belittle him as much as they please.”

Noah Webster, the American word expert, liked this word. He put it in his English language dictionary in 1806: “Belittle—to make someone or something seem small, unimportant.”

In 1872, a famous American word expert decided that the time had come to kill this word. He said, “Belittle has no chance of becoming English. And as more critical writers of America—like those of Britain—feel no need of it, the sooner it is forgotten, the better.”

This expert failed to kill the word. Today, belittle is used not only in the United States and England, but in other countries where the English language is spoken.

【推荐1】The plan：turn the Mars into a blue world with streams and green fields, and then fill it with creatures from the earth.

This idea may sound like something from science fiction, but it is actually being taken seriously by many researchers.

This suggests the future for the “red planet” will be the main topic for discussion at an international conference hosted by NASA this week. Leading researchers as well as science fiction writers will attend the event. It comes as NASA is preparing a multi­billion­dollar Mars research programme.

“Turning the Mars into a little earth has long been a topic in science fiction，”said Dr. Michael Meyer, NASA's senior scientist. “Now, with scientists exploring the reality, we can ask what are the real possibilities of changing the Mars.”

Most scientists agree that the Mars could be turned into a little earth, although much time and money would be needed to achieve this goal. But many experts are shocked by the idea.

“We are destroying our own world at an unbelievable speed and now we are talking about ruining another planet，” said Paul Murdin from the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, UK.

Over the past months, scientists have become increasingly confident they will find Martian life forms. Europe and America's robot explorers have found the proof that water, mixed with soil, exists in large amounts on the planet.

In addition, two different groups of scientists announced on March 28 that they had found signs of methane (甲烷) in the Martian atmosphere; the gas is a waste product of living creatures and could be produced by microbes (微生物) living in the red planet's soil.

But scientists such as Dr. Lisa Pratt, a biologist at Indiana University, say that these microbes will be put in danger by the little earth project.

“Before we have even discovered if there is life on the Mars, we are talking about carrying out projects that would destroy all these native life forms, all the strange microbes that we hope to find buried in the soil，” said Dr. Pratt.

Monica Grady, a planetary scientist at the Natural History Museum, London, shares this view. “We cannot risk starting a global experiment that would wipe out the precious information we are looking for，” she said. “This is just wrong.”

【推荐3】Search engines have changed the way we use the Internet, putting vast sources of information just a few clicks away. But Harvard professor of psychology Line Daniel Wegner’s recent research proves that websites and the Internet are changing the way our memories function. His latest study shows that when people have access to search engines, they remember fewer facts and less information because they know they can rely on“search”as a readily available shortcut.

Wegner believes the new findings show that the Internet has become part of a transactive memory (交互记忆) source, a method by which our brains divide information. Transactive memory exists in many forms, as when a husband relies on his wife to remember a relative’s birthday. You don’t have to remember everything in the world yourself. You just have to remember who knows it. Now computers and technology are becoming virtual extensions of our memory.

Wegner conducted several experiments to demonstrate the phenomenon, using various forms of memory recall to test reliance on computers. In one experiment, participants demonstrated that they were more likely to think of computer terms like “Yahoo” or “Google” after being asked a set of difficult trivia questions. In another experiment, participants typed some statements into a computer and they were told the statements would be saved in specific folders. Next, they were asked to recall the statements. Finally, they were given cues to the wording and asked to name the folders where the statements were stored. The participants proved better able to recall the folder locations than the statements themselves.

Wegner admits that questions remain about whether dependence on computers will affect memories negatively: “Nobody knows now what the effects of these tools are on logical thinking.” Students who have trouble remembering distinct facts, for example, may struggle to employ those facts in critical thinking. But he believes that the situation overall is beneficial, comparing dependence on computers to dependence on a mechanical hand (机械手).

And even though we may not be using our memories to recall distinct facts, we are still using them to consider where the facts are located and how to access them. “We still have to remember things,”Wegner explains. “We’re just remembering a different range of things.”