2 . Friendships can hold an exceptional place in our life stories. What is it about the s connections that make them so unique? Before we dive into the science, let’s first observe on in action.

If I could somehow design a best friend, you know, put together all the ideal qualities of my perfect match, that person would pale in comparison to Priya. She’s always there for me. Last year after I failed my important exam, it felt like my whole world was crashing down. Priya was at my door at the news. I was a wreck, but she sat there with me and listened. We were on the same page!

Early childhood, adolescent, and adult friendships are all a little different in part because the brain works in different ways at those stages of life. Adolescence is a unique time when peer relationships take focus, and thanks to the developing brain, there are changes in the way you value, understand, and connect to friends. Teenage friends can seem attached at the hip.

Scientists describe adolescence as a social re adaption as teenagers begin to spend as much or more time with their friends than with their parents. This drive to hang with pals maybe due to changes in the brain’s reward centre. Its activation makes hanging out with others enjoyable and motivates you to spend more time with them. Neuroimaging(神经成像) studies show that this region is highly reactive during your teenage years, which may explain why adolescents seem to place a higher value on social interactions than children or adults.

Teenage friendships can also feel closer than the friendships of your childhood. This deeper connection is possible thanks to improvements in what scientists call Theory-of Mind the ability to understand others’ emotions, thoughts, motivations, and points of view. Babies begin to develop Theory of Mind around 18 months or so. And scientists know that it continues to improve and mature well into your teenage years and beyond. Likewise, regions within the social brain show increased connectivity during adolescence compared with childhood.

As a result, teens can better understand their friend’s perspectives, allowing for deeper connections to develop. The ability to connect with others somewhat depends on the coordination of actions, emotions, physiology, and thoughts. This is what psychologists call interpersonal synchrony.

3 . A New UK University Wants to Teach Students Skills Employers Actually Want

Getting a university degree has never seemed more important: college graduates earn more money, live longer, and are happier. But college degrees are expensive(especially in the US), narrowly focused(especially in the UK), and often fail to build the skills employers want(true in most countries).

    1    

The London Interdisciplinary School(LIS), which will be launched in 2021 with a target of 100 students, will scrap traditional academic subjects and offer a three-year bachelor of arts and sciences degree designed to tackle real-world issues. The curriculum is built around interdisciplinary problems-knife crime, childhood obesity, palm oil in supply chains, plastic pollution-as well as quantitative and qualitative research skills.

The idea is similar to a US liberal arts degree(a rarity in the UK) but also more clearly focused on “interdisciplinarity,” or drawing on multiple subjects-economics, psychology, sociology, statistics-to solve complex problems like childhood obesity.

    2     The skills students develop, the founders hope, will more closely agree with what an AI-infused, automated world demands: collaboration between people and machines, critical thinking, speaking and writing skills, and data management, to name just a few things.

    3     They are expected to learn subjects, such as knife crime, by understanding cultural and socioeconomic factors in different neighbourhoods, data science, statistics, publicly available data, an economics or psychology lens.

In the UK, students apply through a central clearinghouse, and exam results are paramount.     4     Their interview will include a face-to-face one so that LIS can understand a student’s background, motivations, and passions. After the interview, conditional offers will be granted based on personal background, circumstances and, also, grades.

6 . HL Mencken, the US writer, wrote in his book The American Language, “America’s English is better on all counts — clearer, more sensible and, above all, more charming”. “There is no reason under the sun,” he added, why a language spoken in a country as huge as the US “should yield anything to the dialect of a small minority” in England.

Americans were not the only ones who found the standard English of the English ridiculous. “The Irishman, the Scotsman, the Canadian and the Australian laugh at it along with the American.”

With English spreading around the world, language learners would make their choice. “In Japan and elsewhere in the Far East, the two dialects are in bitter competition, with American apparently prevailing (占优势).”

Mencken’s view that American English would render (使成为) England’s irrelevant was understandable. Yet he wasn’t right. The US is more successful than the UK in manufacturing, technology and military power, but those who make a living speaking and writing standard UK English are doing fine.

Look at this year’s Oscar nominees (被提名者): Benedict Cumberbatch, Eddie Redmayne, Felicity Jones and Keira Knightley. It is true that much of the investment in British film comes from the US. These actors may not sweep the Oscars but their popularity indicates that English English is still an international linguistic currency.

When it comes to written words, London-based Pearson, owner of the Financial Times, is still among the world’s leading publishers.

Was Mencken right that foreigners would choose to learn American English rather than the English variety?

Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s finance minister, studied at Essex and Birmingham universities. His opponent, Antonis Samaras, at Amherst and Harvard Business School. Would Mr Varoufakis’s English betray a British influence and Mr Samaras’s an American one?

No. They both speak an English that, in accent, cadence (节奏) and word choice, is distinctively Greek — that of the well-educated elite.

There is no need for anyone to adopt anyone else’s accent or vocabulary, unless they want to. There is a place for many forms of English. Unlike the Oscars, this was not a contest someone had to lose.

7 . Ask most people to describe the path to success and their answer will likely call for “more”—more money to buy things, more time to do things and more knowledge to inform things. There’s an intuitive appeal of this argument. In terms of success, “more” is thought to be both a cause (the more we have, the more we can do) and a consequence (to the victor go the spoils).

    1     When we are focused on getting more, we overlook the value of what’s already in hand. We emphasize the wrong things, like accumulating resources instead of taking productive steps to accomplish our goals. Over time, the “more” approach makes us less adaptive and less satisfied.

    2     The science of stretching offers an effective, more fulfilling alternative that invigorates us to do more without needing more. It draws from a range of research to explain why some people can do a lot with little while others waste so much.

When we stretch, we engage with our resources. We see their potential rather than worry about their perceived limitations. This helps unlock even greater possibilities for what’s already in hand—whether it’s time, money, materials or even relationships.

Stretching also helps us adapt to changes in our resources when times unexpectedly take a turn for the worse. The habit of stretching prepares us to work through the challenges. With too many resources, we become distracted by accumulation, focused on the wrong goals.     3     We lack the crucial skill of stretching—both the discipline and imagination to be more productive with whatever we have.

Recognize that having less can jump-start us to become more creative. Constraints force us to view problems and solutions in a new light. The power of “less” allows everyone from artists to executives to deliver better work because of an important way we approach the world when facing constraints.     4     That’s why research shows that some of the world’s most complex problems tend to be solved by those with the least direct knowledge about the problem.

10 . Time travel is a favorite plot device in science fiction stories and movies. Perhaps the most famous recent series is Dr. Who, with its traveling Time Lords who whisk himself away throughout time as if traveling by jet. In other stories, the time travel is due to unexplainable circumstances such as a too-close approach to a very massive object like a black hole. However it is described in stories, it seems that traveling through time can always trigger people’s interest and ignite their imaginations. But, is such a thing possible?

It’s important to remember that we are always traveling into the future. That’s the nature of space-time. This is why we remember the past (instead of “remembering” the future). The future is largely unpredictable because it hasn’t happened yet, but everyone is headed into it all the time. To speed up the process, what would or could anyone do to make it happen? It’s a good question without a definitive answer. Right now, no one has built a working time machine to travel temporally. While it’s not possible (yet) to travel to the future faster than the rate at which we’re doing it now, it is possible to speed up the passage of time. But it has only happened so far to very few people who have traveled off Earth’s surface. For them, time moves at an extremely small different rate. Could it happen over longer time spans?

It might, theoretically. According to Einstein’s theory of special relativity, the passage of time is relative to an object’s speed. The more quickly an object moves through space, the more slowly time passes for it. The classic example of traveling into the future is the twin paradox. It works like this: take a pair of twins, each 20 years old. One takes off on a spaceship on a five-year journey traveling at nearly the speed of light. The traveling twin ages five years while on the journey and returns to Earth at the age of 25. However, the twin who stayed behind is 95 years old! The twin on the ship experienced only five years of time passing, but returns to an Earth that is much farther into the future.

Similarly, intense gravitational fields can have the same effect. Time passes more slowly for an observer inside a massive object’s gravitational well. The stronger the gravity, the more it affects the flow of time.

Astronauts on the International Space Station experience a combination of these effects, though on a much smaller scale. Since they are traveling quite quickly and orbiting around Earth (a massive body with significant gravity), time slows down for them compared with people on Earth. The difference is much less than a second over the course of their time in space. But, it is measurable.

Until we can figure out a way to approach the speed of light, or travel near black holes without falling in, we won’t be able to do time travel any significant way into the future.