【推荐1】As you probably know, clothing has been around since the time of Adam and Eve—and it’s become a lot more complicated than those early fig leaf designs. On the other hand, electronics have been with us for only a few hundred years—beginning with Franklin running round with his portable lightning rod. With gadgets（小电子产 品）more popular than ever these days, digital fashion, a combination of clothing and electronics, is simply inevitable.

First let me mention a line of jackets launched in the fall of 2013 by Royal Philips’ Electronics and Levis Strauss Corporation. Philip’s original press release called it “mixing fashion and technology in the creation of work wear for the digital age”. I love that kind of talk. Each design is said to contain a simple body area network using wires placed into various parts of the jacket. What it really does is allow one to use a Philips’ GSM mobile phone and MP3 player in the jacket—all controlled by a unified remote.

A company named Vivo Metrics has designed a different type of electronic garment. It’s called Lifeshirt, and it’s an ambulatory monitoring system stuffed into a flexible, washable T-shirt. Vivo Metrics has built a system that allows doctors to monitor more than 40 physiological signs（heart rate, breathing rate, blood pressure, etc.）over extended periods of time. With that a man who suffers from sleep apnea （呼吸暂停）can send the medical data to his doctor on a regular basis. But this product is not available to customers, as it’s intended for clinical and medical research.

I believe these products are only the tip of the iceberg. More of them will find their way to our future life, making a difference by combining computer technologies with clothing design.

【推荐2】Do you have a smart phone? If so, there is a good way for you to learn English : listening to podcasts (播客)!

Podcasts are made by people from all over the world. You can find them easily on the Internet. There are all kinds of podcasts. Some are about music. Some are about interesting stories. Some are about language learning. Most of the podcasts are free, so you can choose what you are interested in and keep listening.

The other advantage (优点) of listening to podcasts is that you can do it almost any time. You can do it when you are walking to school, or when you are running in the playground. You can do it even when you are going to bed. In this way, your English will be better before you know it.

If you want to learn English well by listening to podcasts, here is something you need to remember. First, do not listen to podcasts when you are riding a bike. That’s too dangerous! Second, make sure the sound of your smart phone is not too loud. The loud sound is bad for your hearing.

【推荐2】Babies don’t learn to talk just from hearing sounds. They are lip (嘴唇) readers too. It happens during the period when a baby’s babbling (咿呀声) slowly changes from unclear voices into that first “mama” or “dada”. The babies have to find out how to shape their lips to make that particular sound they are hearing, according to developmental psychologist David Lewkowicz of Florida Atlantic University, who led the study.

Clearly it doesn’t take them too long to understand the movements that match basic sounds. By their first birthdays, babies start changing back to look you in the eye again. It offers more evidence that quality face-time with babies is very important for speech development more than, say, turning on the latest baby DVD.

But Lewkowicz went a step further. He and his student Amy Hansen Tift tested nearly 180 babies, groups of them at ages 4, 6, 8, 10 and 12 months. How? They showed videos of a woman speaking in English or French to babies of English speakers.   They found   that when   the speaker used English, the 4-month-old   babies gazed (凝视) mostly into her eyes. The 6-month-old babies spent equal amounts (数量) of time looking at the eyes and the mouth. The 8-month-old babies and 10-month-old babies studied mostly the mouth. At 12 months, attention started changing back toward the speaker’s eyes.

But what happened when these babies are used to English heard French? The 12-month-old babies studied the mouth longer, just like younger babies. They needed the extra information to understand the unfamiliar sounds. That fits with research into bilingualism (双语) that shows babies’ brains adjust (调整) themselves to tell the differences between the sounds of their native language over other languages in the first year of life.

The continued lip reading shows the l-year-old babies clearly still are fit for learning. Babies are so hard to study, says Duke University cognitive scientist Greg Appelbaum, who found the research so fantastic that he wants to know more.

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