If you're secretly worried about your smart phone addiction, then the new NoPhone might be just the thing you need. It looks and feels exactly like a smart phone, but it does nothing. It's just a piece of plastic that you can carry around in your hand to fool yourself.

Dutch designer Ingmar Larsen came up with the idea as a joke along with his two friends. To their great surprise, the idea received a lot of attention online and people from all over the world started placing requests for NoPhones of their own. So that's when the three friends decided to turn to collecting enough fund for mass production.

    NoPhone is currently a prototype (模型) that will cost only $12 once it hits the market It is 5.5 inches high, 2.6 inches wide and 0.29 inches thick, bringing it quite close to the latest smart phones on the market. It is described as “battery free”, “no upgrades necessary,” “shatter-proof (抗震)”, “waterproof” and “an alternative to constant hand-to-phone contact that allows you to stay connected with the real world.”

“Phone addiction is everywhere,” the designers insist. “It's ruining your dates. It's distracting you at concerts. It's blocking sidewalks. Now, there is a real solution. With a thin, light and completely wireless design, the NoPhone acts as a substitute to any smart mobile device, enabling you to always have a phone to hold without giving up potential engagement with your direct environment.”

If you're interested in NoPhone, but concerned about not being able to take selfies (自拍) anymore. Don't feel upset. The makers do have an upgrade at no extra charge—the mirror sticker. That way, they say, you can enjoy “real-time” selfies with your friends when they're standing right behind you.

    Young people and older people do not always agree with each other. They sometimes have different ideas about living, working and playing. But in one special program in New York State, adults and teenagers live together in a friendly way.

    Each summer 200 teenagers and 50 adults live together for eight weeks as members of a special work group. Everyone works several hours each day. They do so not just to keep busy but to find meaning and enjoyment in work. Some teenagers work in the woods or on the farms near the village. Some learn to make things like tables and chairs and to build houses. The adults teach them these skills.

    There are several free hours each day. Weekends are free, too. During the free hours some of the teenagers learn photo-taking or painting. Others sit around and talk or sing. Each teenager chooses his own way to spend his free time.

    When people live together, rules are necessary. In this program, the teenagers and the adults make the rules together. If someone breaks a rule, the problem goes before the whole group. They talk about it and ask, “Why did it happen? What should we do about it?”

    One of the teenagers has this to say about the experience, “You stop thinking only about yourself. You learn how to think about the group.”

    That people often experience trouble sleeping in a different bed in unfamiliar surroundings is a phenomenon known as the 4Tirst-nighf, effect. If a person stays in the same room the following night they tend to sleep more soundly. Yuka Sasaki and her colleagues at Brown University set out to investigate the origins of this effect.

    Dr. Sasaki knew the first-night effect probably has something to do with how humans evolved.

    The puzzle was what benefit would be gained from it when performance might be affected the following day. She also knew from previous work conducted on birds and dolphins that these animals put half of their brains to sleep at a time so that they can rest while remaining alert enough to avoid predators (捕食者). This led her to wonder if people might be doing the same thing. To take a closer look, her team studied 35 healthy people as they slept in the unfamiliar environment of the university's Department of Psychological Sciences. The participants each slept in the department for two nights and were carefully monitored with techniques that looked at the activity of their brains. Dr. Sasaki found, as expected, the participants slept less well on their first night than they did on their second, taking more than twice as long to fall asleep and sleeping less overall. During deep sleep, the participants' brains behaved in a similar manner seen in birds and dolphins. On the first night only, the left hemispheres (半球) of their brains did not sleep nearly as deeply as their right hemispheres did.

    Curious if the left hemispheres were indeed remaining awake to process information detected in the surrounding environment, Dr. Sasaki re-ran the experiment while presenting the sleeping participants with a mix of regularly timed beeps (蜂鸣声) of the same tone and irregular beeps of a different tone during the night. She worked out that, if the left hemisphere was staying alert to keep guard in a strange environment, then it would react to the irregular beeps by stirring people from sleep and would ignore the regularly timed ones. This is precisely what she found.

    Please take a few seconds and think of your personal biggest goal. Imagine telling someone you meet today what you're going to do. Imagine their congratulations and their high image of you. Doesn't it feel good to say it out loud? Don't you feel one step closer already? Well, bad news: you should have kept your mouth shut, because that good feeling will make you less likely to do it.

    Any time you have a goal, there is some work that needs to be done to achieve it. Ideally, you would not be satisfied until you'd actually done the work. But when you tell someone your goal and he acknowledges (认可) it, psychologists have found it's called a "social reality". The mind is kind of tricked into feeling that it's already done. And then, because you've felt that satisfaction, you're less motivated to do the actual hard work necessary. This goes against the traditional wisdom that we should tell our friends our goals, right?

    In 1982, Peter Gollwitzer, a Professor of Psychology, wrote a whole book about this. And in 2009, he did some new tests that were published. It goes like this: 163 people across four separate tests—everyone wrote down their personal goal. Then half of them announced their commitment (许诺) to this goal to the room, and half didn't. Then everyone was given 45 minutes of work that would directly lead them towards their goal, but they were told that they could stop at any time. Now those who kept their mouths shut worked the entire 45 minutes on average, and when asked afterwards, said they felt they had a long way to go to achieve their goal. But those who had announced it quit after only 33 minutes on average, and when asked afterwards, said that they felt much closer to achieving their goal.

It was not until photographer Rita Nannini left New York that she grew fascinated by the city's subways. While living in Manhattan for some 15 years in the 1980s and early 1990s, Nannini only commuted (通勤) on the one train-given the subway system's bad reputation. But after relocating to New Jersey for several years where subway is not an option, Nannini found that absence did make the heart grow fonder — maybe even for pizza rats. During her visit back to New York, Nannini nodded, noticing improvements in the subway's facilities.

While Nannini was waiting for a train, a bench on the platform opposite caught her attention due to the ever changing faces and characters. They were people of different accents, colors and beliefs. They were from all walks of life, a diverse mix of New Yorkers all there for their own different reasons. Having learned the teenagers' popular "End of the Line" challenge — boarding trains at random and riding them until their final destination; Nannini decided to visit every first and last stop across the NY subway's lines with her beloved camera.

Nannini's "End of the Line" experience saw her traveling some 665 miles across 26 routes in New York city. She took over 8,000 photos of the final stations, as well as the communities they served. In many cases, she rode the routes two or three times over to ensure she got "the shot". "The project really shows me how important the subway is, and how sustainable it makes our lives," she said 

"It's often said that my photos show the end of the lines — the last stops," she said. "But theend of the line is indeed the start for so many people. That made me think about who the people and the communities that live at the two ends are and what it is that the subway means to them."

Nannini was proud of her set of images directly challenging the traditions of story telling, which echoed both the boredom and excitement of travel on tracks.

Nannini enjoyed taking her time, starting her challenge in 2013 and only shooting the final photos last year. Her first monograph on the terminal stops of the NY subway was released in April 2023.

"When you drive in the suburbs, you don't have those encounters," she continued. "People enter your life on the subway. That's what strikes me most on my jouney on tracks."

The rejuvenating effects of a restorative nocturnal repose are widely recognized; it can engender a state of enhanced well-being. Academics in the field posit that the excellence of one's slumber may indeed be instrumental in the prolongation of one's lifespan.

Male subjects who enjoy a state of somnolent tranquility could potentially extend their existence by a span of nearly five decades in comparison to those bereft of such repose. The female counterparts stand to gain an increment of two decades. Additionally, it has been observed that youthful individuals who adhere to salutary somniferous routines are less susceptible to a premature demise. However, the mere quantity of repose is insufficient to reap the potential healthful dividends; the caliber of one's slumber is equally pivotal.

The parameters of commendable slumber were delineated by a quintet of distinct criteria. These encompassed an optimal duration of seven to eight hours of repose per nocturnal cycle; experiencing difficulty in the initiation of sleep no more than twice per hebdomadal period; similar challenges in maintaining somnolence no more than twice weekly; abstaining from the consumption of any soporific pharmaceuticals; and awakening with a sensation of invigoration on no fewer than five days per septenary cycle.

The conclusions derived from the study intimate that approximately 8% of fatalities, irrespective of their etiology, could be imputed to inadequate somniferous patterns. Dr. Frank Qian, a resident physician specializing in internal medicine at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, America, remarked, "A distinct proportional response relationship was discerned. Consequently, an increase in the beneficial elements pertaining to the quality of sleep correlates with a progressive diminution in mortality from all causes."

The research collated data from a populace of 172,321 individuals with an average age of 50, of which 54% were female. These participants were engaged in the National Health Interview Survey, spanning the years 2013 to 2018, which sought to scrutinize the well-being of the American populace, inclusive of inquiries into their somniferous habits.

The subjects were tracked for a mean period of 4.3 years, during which 8,681 succumbed to death. Of these fatalities, 2,610 (30%) were attributable to cardiovascular afflictions, 2,052 (24%) to oncological disorders, and 4,019 (46%) to a miscellany of other causes. Among the male and female participants who reported adherence to all five indices of quality sleep (an optimal quintile score), the expectancy of life was augmented by 4.7 years for males and by 2.4% for females, in contradistinction to those who possessed none or a solitary factor.

Further scholarly endeavor is warranted to elucidate the raison d'être for the dichotomy in the enhancement of life expectancy, with males exhibiting twice the increment observed in females despite equivalent somniferous quality.

A caveat of the study lies in the reliance on self-reported somniferous habits, which were not subjected to objective quantification or verification.