1 . The eyes are the windows of the soul (心灵). Having a pair of bright, clear eyes is very important, so we should protect our eyes throughout our lives.

    1    

Don’t read while lying down or walking. Relax after every hour of reading. Keep a distance from the TV set when you watch TV and give your eyes a rest every 30 minutes. Don’t stare at (盯看) the sun or try to read in the darkness.     2     This can damage your eyes easily.

Get your eyes checked often.

Not many people have this habit, but it is necessary. If you feel that there is something wrong with your eyes, get them checked quickly.     3    

Rest your eyes whenever you can.

You can close your eyes for a few seconds or look into the distance for one or two minutes. A small break will relax your eyes.     4    

Besides, be careful when you choose your glasses.     5     Make sure your glasses are right for you. If you don’t feel right, get your glasses changed.

2 . Bad teeth may be painful and it’s getting worse without treatment. They can even ruin your life. Illness of the teeth can find its way into the blood system. This can increase the chances of a heart disease or other illnesses.

Experts say good care for teeth should start at birth. Mothers’ milk is the best food for the healthy development of teeth.

But dentists say a baby’s mouth and early teeth should be cleaned after each feeding. Use a cloth with a little warm water. Do the same if a baby is fed with a bottle. Experts say if you decide to put your baby to sleep with a bottle, give him only water.

When a baby’s teeth begin to appear, you can clean them with a wet toothbrush. Dentists say it is important to find soft toothbrushes made especially for babies and to use them very gently. Young children often eat toothpaste (牙膏) when they brush their teeth, so they should be carefully watched when they brush their teeth.

Parents often ask what effect thumb sucking (吮拇指) might have on their baby’s teeth. Experts generally agree that this is fine early in life. Most children stop sucking their thumbs by the age of four. If it continues, parents should talk to their children’s dentists or doctors.

Dentists say children should have their first dental visit by the time they are one year old. They say babies should be examined when their first teeth appear, usually at around six months.

5 . What is the best sleep position for your health?

It’s difficult to control what sleeping position we naturally fall into, as our body will subconsciously all into the most comfortable position for us. However, some positions are better for you than others and come could hold back your health and wellbeing.     1     .

If you sleep on your side

More than 60 per cent of people sleep on their side. Often our body naturally moves to this position, which is linked to when we were in the womb in the foetal(胎儿的) position.    2    It offers a number of benefits to your body, from promoting healthy spine alignment(脊椎对齐) which can help to prevent back pain to reducing heartburn and snoring(打鼾).

If you sleep on your back

Lying on your back is the second most popular sleeping position and offers just as many benefits as side sleeping. When you’re sleeping on your back, it’s easy to keep alignment and to also evenly distribute your weight.     3    

If you sleep on your stomach

Sleeping on your stomach is the least common sleeping position.     4     . And those who sleep on their stomach could put themselves at risk of a less restful night’s sleep. The stomach offers the least amount of back support and can increase pressure on the spine which may cause pain once you wake up.

    5     You should consider various factors such as if you snore or suffer sleep problems, or if you often have back and neck pain. Side sleeping has been noted as the best position for the body, so this is probably one to try and get into the habit of trying, but again, it all depends on you.

6 . For hundreds of years, scientists learned about the brain by observing people recovering from injuries. Many with an injury on the left side of the brain had problems understanding or using words. From this, doctors reasoned that the left brain must manage speech and language. They didn’t know, though, if speech and language centers were on this side in everyone. The finding of a new study may be able to tell the answer.

In the new study, researchers used fMRI (功能性磁共振成像) to watch brains in action as 39 children and 14 adults tried to understand sentences. Each fMRI scan (扫描) produced many pictures of the brain. Patches of color in each image highlighted which parts of the brain were getting the most blood. This is a sign that they were turned on and active.

To the researchers’ surprise, the left side of the brain was not the only part that was turned on in the children. Both sides became active when they tried to understand a sentence. That activity in the right brain started to fall in children who were older. By age 19, no activity showed up on the right. All speech-and-language processing now was taking place only on the left. The move from two-sided to one-sided language processing takes place gradually. It starts around the time we learn to talk.

Elissa Newport, who led the study, finds it exciting that children have speech centers on both sides of their brains. “If both sides of their brains can pitch in, this may also explain why left-brain injuries often are not as damaging in young children as in adults,” said she.

Children process language like “mental switch-hitters”. So, the next time you think your parents or older siblings (兄弟姐妹) don’t understand you, give them a break. They could be using just a smaller part of their brains.

8 . Have you ever wondered if you see the same colours as other people? Most people know what blue is when they see it. They call it "blue” because they were taught the word and connected it with what they saw. But how do you know what you see as blue isn’t someone else s red?

The ability to perceive (感知) different colours is up to receptors (接受器) in our eyes. Light waves hit these receptors and they react depending on which colour the light is, sending signals to the brain. The brain then reads these signals to determine which colour light the eyes are receiving.

Some people’s receptors are more developed than others. The inability of the receptor to feel the light waves correctly means that some people cannot tell the differences between similar colours.

Those with more developed receptors can see more colours. We sometimes hear people having an argument about whether something is dark blue or black. It might be because one person has stronger receptors to feel the light than another.

In the past, most scientists would argue that everyone saw colours in the same way. However, research was conducted on monkeys, in which their receptors were changed. This enabled them to see more colours than usual. Normally monkeys can only see blue and green, but the change allowed them to see red. Their brains automatically (自动地) got used to new colours. This suggests that our brains may adapt depending on our stimulus (刺激) and find new colors of the things we see. Colours could be a very personal experience, unique to everyone.

So, the next time you talk about your favourite colour, just remember if yours is blue and your friend says red, you two might actually be thinking about the same colour. What if everyone in the world has the same favourite colour, but just calls it different names?

9 . In English it’s common to say, “I know this town like the back of my hand!” While we may know our towns really well, how well do we actually know our hands? Maybe not quite as well as we think, said a scientific study.

Matthew Longo and his team from University College London studied the left hands of 100 people. With their hands placed palms down under a board, Longo’s team gave the instruction to point to their knuckles and fingertips with a marker. How did they do? Not that well.

“People think their hand is wider than it actually is,” said Longo. He said they also seemed to think their fingers were shorter than their true lengths. People were most accurate when finding their thumbs, but became less accurate with each finger, up to their little fingers.

“It is connected to our sense of position,” explained Longo. Humans know where different parts of our bodies are, even if we can’t see them. “It tells us whether a joint is straight or not,” said Longo. “We also need to know the distances between our joints,” he went on. Our brains know the sizes and shapes of our bodies from the maps they make for themselves. “This experiment tried to find those maps,” he said.

Maybe maps don’t need to be perfect. But why aren’t our brains more accurate? Longo said our brains “see” areas based on our sense of touch, with the stronger the sense of touch in a specific body part, the bigger that body part seems. An example is our lips. As they have more nerves than our noses, our brain’s map shows our lips are bigger. The same thing can happen with body parts that have a lot of nerves. If you’ve ever had something stuck in your teeth, it probably felt huge! That’s because our tongues also have lots of nerves.

If you want to have some fun, try this test with your classmates. Get some boards and some markers and have them mark the spots where they think their knuckles and fingertips are. Compare their hands to the marker spots and see how well they have performed.