My husband and I are saving thousands of dollars every year by growing our own vegetables in our backyard. We learn something new every year and this website has been made to share tips with other people that would like to grow some of their own food.

    It's true that if you are starting from fresh, it will cost a little bit of money to get started. However, once everything is set up, the cost is very small and the rewards are huge. The size of your family and how many vegetables you eat determine exactly how much money you can save every year. We do a lot of juicing, so we are saving thousands of dollars by growing some carefully selected greens.

    There is an amazing sense of accomplishment when you grow your own vegetables. Vegetables out of your vegetable garden don't get any fresher, tastier or more satisfying. The whole family can get involved in this hobby and kids will learn where food comes from and appreciate nature even more.

    Our approach to vegetable gardening is completely different from the normal one. We are doing it in the lazy way with zero digging and fertilizing(施肥). The way we grow our vegetables is to emulate natural ecosystems. No rows of carrots can be found in our garden beds. Rain forests seem to do just fine without human interference(干预) or having plants sown in rows, so we have applied the same principle to our vegetable garden and we care producing more vegetables than ever.

    By copying nature we spend little time working in the vegetable garden but get a much better crop than previous years when we followed the rules. What can I say? We're such rebels.(叛逆者）

    While we all try to find happiness, sometimes we still end up feeling low. While most people can control this feeling, low moods can stay with some, leading to depression. About 322 million people suffered from depression in 2015, according to a report by the World Health Organization in February. This is more than 4 percent of the world's population.

    Depression is described by the WHO as a mental disorder. It has several symptoms including sadness, loss of interest and feelings of low self-worth. In severe cases, depression may even lead to suicide.

    The number of people living with depression is increasing. The WHO reported a rise of 18.4 percent between 2005 and 2015. Young people are a group known to suffer with depression. “The pressures on today's youth are like no other generation, perhaps,” Dan Chisholm, an official of WHO, told Reuters.

    In China, depression among young people is on the rise, Zhu Zhuohong, a psychology professor with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, told Xinhua News Agency. Competition to outperform others, especially in education, can cause a lot of pressure for Chinese youth.

    Almost 1.2 million Chinese people aged 15 to 24 suffer from depression, according to a report released by British science journal The Lancet in May.

    Luckily, more and more efforts are being made to deal with this problem. This year's World Health Day, held on April 7, will focus on depression. The day will highlight (强调) the “Depression: let's talk” campaign. The campaign aims to make sure that people with depression both seek and get help.

    Have you ever run into a careless cell phone user on the street? Perhaps they were busy talking, texting or checking updates on WeChat without looking at what was going on around them. As the number of this new "species" of human has kept rising, they have been given a new name — phubbers（低头族）.

    Recently, a cartoon created by students from China Central Academy of Fine Arts put this group of people under the spotlight. In the short film, phubbers with various social identities bury themselves in their phones. A doctor plays with his cell phone while letting his patient die, a pretty woman takes selfie（自拍照）in front of a car accident site, and a father loses his child without knowing about it while using his mobile phone. A chain of similar events eventually leads to the destruction of the world.

    Although the ending sounds overstated, the damage phubbing can bring is real. Your health is the first to bear the effect and result of it. "Constantly bending your head to check your cell phone could damage your neck," Guangming Daily quoted doctors as saying. "the neck is like a rope that breaks after long-term stretching." Also, staring at cell phones for long periods of time will damage your eyesight gradually, according to the report.

    But that's not all. Being a phubber could also damage your social skills and drive you away from your friends and family. At reunions with family or friends, many people tend to stick to their cell phones while others are chatting happily with each other and this creates a strange atmosphere, Qilu Evening News reported.

    It can also cost you your life. There have been lots of reports on phubbers who fell to their death, suffered accidents, and were robbed of their cell phones in broad daylight.

    Believe it or not, the size of the human brain has become smaller over the past 20,000 years. Scientists argue over whether this means we are becoming more or less intelligent as a species.

    “I'd call that a major downsizing in an evolutionary eye blink (眨眼),” John Hawks told Discover magazine.

    Why is the brain becoming smaller?

    There are different theories to explain it. One is that tens of thousands of years ago, before the decline began, to survive in cold and dangerous conditions, humans needed a stronger and larger body and therefore, a larger head. Also they had to chew the tough meat of rabbits, foxes and horses. As conditions improved, the brain stopped growing, according to supporters of this theory.

    Another theory comes from a recent study by David Geary and Drew Bailey. They found that brain size decreased as population density(密度) increased.

    “As complex societies appeared, the brain became smaller because people did not have to be as smart to stay alive.” Geary told AFP.

    But smaller brain size does not necessarily mean that modern humans are less smart than their ancestors. “Modern humans simply developed different, more complex forms of intelligence,” said Brian Hare.

    Hare's studies focus on two types of great apes: chimpanzees and bonobos. Both are much like humans, but are physically quite different from one another. The bonobo has a smaller brain than the chimpanzee, and is also much less aggressive and more tolerant.

    “When it comes to working out a problem,” Hare said, “chimpanzees are much less likely to accomplish it if it involves working together. Not so with bonobos.”

The smaller brain in modern humans may be evidence that we can cooperate,” Hare told the US National Public Radio.

    I just celebrated my 95th birthday last week, and people always ask me about my secret. Of course, it's important to eat right and exercise, but that's not much of a secret. I actually have quite a few friends over the age of 90, and we all say the same thing: laughter. Are we telling jokes all the time? Not necessarily. Are we watching funny movies around the clock? Of course not. Do we take the time to laugh at ourselves and generally try to keep things light as much as we can? Certainly. One of the best ways to make sure you laugh every day is to be around children or pets because they just can't help being funny! And what about those polite little laughs when your neighbor tells a joke that isn't really funny, but you laugh anyway? Those are fine, but the ones where you laugh with your whole body and mind are the ones where you end up tired and out of breath, where everyone around you starts laughing, too. My “senior” friends and I even came up with a nice round number: For each full “belly laugh” you have, you'll live one extra hour in your lifetime. Now that might not sound like much, but if you have one every day, you'll live an extra three or four years. I try to have between five and ten of those laughs every day, and so should you.

    The introduction of the iPad, with its touch screen technology, has allowed even very young children to take advantage of a computer. So what if all children in a school were given an iPad to use in class and take home with them?

    Anne Laure Bazin works in a school where every child, teacher and teaching assistant is given a free iPad to use in and out of lessons. For her, the main advantage of everyone having an iPad had been the improvement in communication. Documents can be emailed straight over to workmates during a meeting. Children submit their homework by email, or through the school's learning environment. Teachers now take the register (点名) using their iPad, which means that there is a record of which children are in school, and which classroom they are in.

    The use of iPad has encouraged greater sharing of resources among teacher. All communication with parents is now done by email. Working as a group in class is much easier as children can share documents. The whole class can look at one child's work by attaching (连接) the iPad to the whiteboard. If a child has forgotten the textbook, the teacher can take a photograph of the relevant (相关的) page and send it to the student in class.

    While the use of the iPad in schools has revolutionized (变革) the way children are taught, it hasn't completely replaced more traditional methods of teaching. Worksheets are still used in class as some children prefer the contact with paper. The children all have a textbook and exercise books. In Anne Laure's school, parents feared that the iPads would replace exercise books and children would lose handwriting skills. Anne Laure says, "The teacher are not ready to let go of the traditional style of teaching. We have welcomed the iPads in so much as they help communication and widen the resources available but we are not ready to let go of paper yet. The children themselves still value their exercise books and depend on them for review."