Are you bored with the same old walls? Do you wish to give your bedroom the much-needed changes? Have a look at the designs given below, and get inspired.

A Leaf from Nature!

The first idea that we shall be looking at is all about painting leaves on your walls. If you are someone who feels that the ideal way to relax and unwind is to spend time in nature, then this design is “the one” for you. However, patterns of leaves can only be used on green walls; if you use them on any other color, the effect will never be the same!

Decor Tip: To stress this look on your walls, choose wooden furniture that is dark brown or black

Clouds in the Sky!

If you’re looking for a cool, quiet design for the walls of kids’ bedrooms, then go for one that has clouds floating in a clear blue sky. If you wish to be a little more creative, you can place birds, airplanes etc. around the clouds. In the images given alongside, you can see that a yellow clock has been used creatively to represent the sun. Similarly, you can use elements of home decor to add to the effect of the wall art.

Decor Tip: To keep the look as close to nature as possible, use shades of blue on your walls

A Portrait of Yourself!

If you’re fond of personalized coffee cups and key chains, then a personalized wall is just night for you! Putting up an enlarged photograph of yourself on your bedroom wall can be a signature style in itself. Do you have a particular photograph that is really close to your heart? It can be a photograph of you with your spouse, your parents, or your circle of friends.

Decor Tip: Use lights to add a real shine to the photograph on the wall.

When trying to memorize new material, it's easy to assume that the more work you put in, the better you will perform. Yet taking the occasional rest time-to do nothing at all — may be exactly what you need. Just dim (调暗) the lights, sit back, and enjoy 10-15 minutes of quiet thinking, and you’ll find that your memory of the facts you have just learnt is far better than if you had attempted to use that moment more productively.

The remarkable memory-boosting benefits of undisturbed rest were first documented in 1900 by the German psychologist Georg Elias Muller and his student Alfons Pilzecker. In one of their many experiments on memory consolidation, Muller and Pilzecker first asked their participants to learn a list of meaningless syllables. Following a short study period, half the group were immediately given a second list to learn — while the rest were given a six-minute break before continuing.

When tested one-and-a-half hours later, the two groups showed strikingly different patterns of recall. The participants given the break remembered nearly 50% of their list, compared to an average of 28% for the group who had been given no time to recharge their mental batteries. The finding suggested that our memory for new information is especially weak just after it has first been memorized, making it more impressionable to interference from new information.

Taking regular periods of rest, without distraction, could help us all hold onto new material a little more firmly. After all, for many students, the 10 — 30% improvements recorded in some studies could mark the difference between A grade or B. “I can imagine you could include these 10 — 15-minute breaks within a revision period, “says Aidan Homer at the University of York, “and that might be a useful way of making small improvements to your ability to remember later on.”

In the age of information overload, it's worth remembering that our smartphones aren't the only thing that needs a regular recharge. Our minds clearly do too.

North America has lost nearly 3 billion birds since 1970, according to a new analysis of bird survey and radar data from across the continent.

The sharp decline, described in a study published Thursday in the journal Science, is not just bad for birds. It also bodes ill for the ecosystems those birds inhabit, and points to a need for action to come to a stop and perhaps reverse (反转) the drop. “Three billion was a pretty astonishing number for us,” said lead author Kenneth Rosenberg, a conservation scientist at Cornell University and the American Bird Conservancy.

Many animals are threatened with extinction because of human activity, but that’s not the only way we do harm. The loss of abundance spells trouble too because it can have huge consequences for the ecosystems they inhabit. Scientists studying North American birds had known that at least some species were declining, but they didn’t know what the net loss, or gain, for all birds might be.

“Previously we didn’t have good estimates of population size,” Rosenberg said. “We knew the trends, but we didn’t really know how many birds of each kind were out there.” To find out, he and his colleagues analyzed more than a dozen bird survey data sets that covered 529 bird species across a host of ecosystems in the U. S. and Canada. Of those lost birds, 90% came from just 12 bird families that include common and widespread species such as sparrows, swallows, warblers and finches.

Declines in the abundance of common species may not seem as dramatic as the endangerment of rare ones, but it is a very serious form of ecosystem eating away. That’s because abundant species often play important roles in their biomes (生物群落), whether they control pests, pollinate (对……授粉) flowers, spread seeds or provide food for other animals.