Have you ever noticed what happens to an idea once you express it?Just talking about it or writing it down causes you to make it clear in your own mind.How can you use this to increase your brain power?Start writing.

    By putting thoughts into words,you are telling yourself the logic behind what you think,feel,or only partly understand.Often,explaining a thought is the process of understanding.In other words,you increase your brain power by exercising your “explain power”.

    Another benefit of writing is that it helps you remember.Many,if not most,highly productive people are always taking notes.You can try keeping it all in your head,but if you keep a journal of your ideas,the next time you're working on a big project,you'll probably have more success.

    Want to understand a topic?Write a book about it.That's an extreme example,but if you are learning something new,write a letter to a friend about it,and you will understand it better.Want to invent something?Write an explanation of the problem—why you want to solve it,and why it is worth solving,and you're halfway there.

    Writers don't always write because they clearly understand something beforehand.Often,they write about something because they want to understand it.You can do the same.Writing will help bring you to an understanding. Give it a try.

    Many blind people use guide dogs to help them get safely from place to place and to warn them of danger. But what can blind people do if they are allergic(过敏的) to dogs or just don't like them? For these people, they can turn to the Guide Horse Foundation.

    Janet and Don Burleson founded(成立) the organization in 1999. They began training miniature horses to help guide blind people. Miniature horses look just like common horses, only much smaller. They are generally less than 34 inches tall.

    Cuddles was the foundation's first guide horse in full service. She became 45-year-old Dan Shaw's helper. Shaw has an eye disease and his sight is very poor. One night, while filling out a form to get a guide dog, Shaw heard a news story on TV about people training horses to guide the blind. Shaw loves horses and wanted a guide animal that would live a long time. So he applied(申请)，and a year later, Cuddles and Shaw began training as a team.

    On a trip to New York, Cuddles helped Shaw safely visit many places of interest .They even traveled on a boat and on the subway system.

    Shaw says that he is very lucky to have Cuddles. He believes that Cuddles has changed his life for the better by giving him the chance to do things himself and making him feel much more confident about himself.

    He was once referred to as the Picasso of poetry. Beloved by Chileans of all classes, he is one of the most widely read and respected poets in history. And this year is the 100th birthday of Pablo Neruda (1904-1973).

    Born with the name Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basolto, he was a tall, shy and lonely boy. He loved to read and started to write poetry when he was ten. The American poet Walt Whitman, whose framed picture Neruda later kept on his table, became a major influence on his work.

    However, his father did not like the idea of having a poet for a son and tried to discourage him from writing. To cover up the publication of his first poem, he took the pen name Pablo Neruda.

    In 1924 Neruda gained fame with his most widely read work “Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair''. Yet his rich experience as a diplomat and exile made him go beyond the theme of love. His work also reflected the political struggle of the left and development of South America. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.

    Neruda loved the sea which he saw as creative, destructive and forever moving. He found inspiration in the power and freedom of the waves and the seabirds on the coast. “I need the sea because it teaches me,” he wrote. “I move in the university of the waves.” He loved how the sea forever renewed itself, a renewal echoed in his work.

    In February, 2015, a South Korean woman was sleeping on the floor when her robot vacuum ate her hair, forcing her to call for emergency help. It surely isn't what Stephen Hawking warned us that intelligent devices “mean the end of the human race”. But it does highlight one of the unexpected dangers of inviting robots into our home.

    There are many examples of intelligent technology going bad, but more often than not, they involve cheating rather than physical danger. Meanwhile, increasing evidence suggests that we, especially children, tend to tell our deepest, darkest secrets to human robots. So how do we protect ourselves from giving-away code?

    Once you've invited a robot into your home, you need to manage your expectations. Movies and marketing may have told us to expect deep interaction with robots friends but we've still got a long way to go before they are as socially aware as described. Given the gulf between expectation and reality, it's important to avoid being tricked.

    The message is clear: as robots became increasingly connected to the internet, and able to respond to natural language, you need to especially cautious about figuring out who or what you are talking about.

    We also need to think about how information is being stored and shared when it comes to robots that can record our every move. Some recording devices may have been designed for entertainment but can easily be adapted for more dangerous purposes. Take Nixie, the wearable camera that can fly off your wrist at a moment's notice and take shots around you in the air. It doesn't take much imagination to see how such technology could be taken advantage of.

    If the technology around us is able to record and process speech, images and movement, or listen secretly to us, what will happen to that information? Where will it be stored? Who will have access?

    So, what is the safest way to welcome robots into our homes, public spaces, and social lives? We should be cautiously optimistic that intelligent machines could become enriching companions, while acknowledging that we need to determine strict boundaries for robots. There should be someone to turn to should your robot commit a crime, steal your card... or try to eat your hair.

    “How can we live longer?” many people wonder. Being sociable looks like a good way to add years to your life. Relationships with family, friends, neighbors, even pets, will all do the trick, but the biggest longevity (长寿) boost seems to come from marriage or an equal relationship. The effect was first noted in 1858 by William Farr, who wrote in 1858 by William Farr, who wrote that widows and widowers (鳏夫) were at a much higher risk of dying than their married peers. Studies since then suggest that marriage could add as much as seven years to a man's life and two to a woman's, The effect holds for all causes of death, whether illness, accident or self-harm.

    Even though the odds are stacked against you (the conditions are not favourable to you), marriage can more than compensate. Linda Waite of the University of Chicago has found that a married older man with heart disease can expect to live nearly four years longer than an unmarried man with a healthy heart. Likewise, a married man who smokes more than a pack a day is likely to live as long as a divorced man who doesn't smoke. There's a less pleasant side, however, as partners are more likely to become ill or die in the couple of years following their spouses; death, and caring for a spouse with mental disorder can leave you with some of the same severe problems. Even so, the odds favour marriage. In a 30-year study of more than 10,000 people, Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School describes how all kinds of social networks have similar effects.

    So how does it work? The effects are complex, affected by socioeconomic factor, health-service provision, emotional support and other more physiological mechanisms (机制). For example, social contact can boost development of the brain and immune system, leading to better health and less chance of depression later in life. People in supportive relationships may handle stress better. Then there are the psychological benefits of a supportive partner.

    A life partner, children and good friends are all recommended if you aim to live to 100. The best social network is still being mapped out, but Christakis says: “People are interconnected so their health is interconnected.”

    I was in the middle of the Amazon (亚马逊) with my wife, who was there as a medical researcher. We flew on a small plane to a faraway village. We did not speak the local language, did not know the customs, and more often than not, did not entirely recognize the food. We could not have felt more foreign.

    We were raised on books and computers, highways and cell phones, but now we were living in a village without running water or electricity It was easy for us to go to sleep at the end of the day feeling a little misunderstood.

    Then one perfect Amazonian evening, with monkeys calling from beyond the village green, we played soccer. I am not good at soccer, but that evening it was wonderful. Everyone knew the rules. We all spoke the same language of passes and shots. We understood one another perfectly. As darkness came over the field and the match ended, the goal keeper, Juan, walked over to me and said in a matter-of-fact way, "In your home, do you have a moon too?" I was surprised.

    After I explained to Juan that yes, we did have a moon and yes, it was very similar to his, I felt a sort of awe (敬畏) at the possibilities that existed in his world. In Juan's world, each village could have its own moon. In Juan's world. the unknown and undiscovered was vast and marvelous. Anything was possible.

    In our society, we know that Earth has only one moon. We have looked at our planet from every angle and found all of the wildest things left to find. I can, from my computer at home, pull up satellite images of Juan's village. There are no more continents and no more moons to search for, little left to discover. At least it seems that way.

    Yet, as I thought about Juan's question, I was not sure how much more we could really rule out. I am, in part, an ant biologist, so my thoughts turned to what we know about insect life and I knew that much in the world of insects remains unknown. How much, though? How ignorant (无知的) are we? The question of what we know and do not know constantly bothered me.

    I began collecting newspaper articles about new species, new monkey, new spider…, and on and on they appear. My drawer quickly filled. I began a second drawer for more general discoveries: new cave system discovered with dozens of nameless species, four hundred species of bacteria found in the human stomach. The second drawer began to fill and as it did I wondered whether there were bigger discoveries out there, not just species, but life that depends on things thought to be useless, life even without DNA. I started a third drawer for these big discoveries. It fills more slowly, but all the same, it fills.

    In looking into the stories of biological discovery, I also began to find something else, a collection of scientists, usually brilliant occasionally half-mad, who made the discoveries. Those scientists very often see the same things that other scientists see, but they pay more attention to them, and they focus on them to the point of exhaustion (穷尽), and at the risk of the ridicule of their peers. In looking for the stories of discovery, I found the stories of these people and how their lives changed our view of the world.

    We are repeatedly willing to imagine we have found most of what is left to discover. We used to think that insects were the smallest organisms (生物), and that nothing lived deeper than six hundred meters. Yet, when something new turns up, more often than not, we do not even know its name.