“The U．S.Food and Drug Administration(FDA)is considering to put stricter limits over tanning salons(晒黑廊)and wants to ban anyone younger than 18 years of age from using a tanning bed，”an advisory panel(专家团)announced last week.

    The panel is calling for tighter controls on the industry such as requiring teenagers to get the approval from their parents before using tanning beds or limiting the use of artificial tanning to a certain age.“Given the absence of any demonstrated benefits，I think it is an obligation for us to ban artificial tanning for those under 18，”said panelist Dr.Michael Olding.

    Along with a possible ban for teenagers，the panel also recommended that visible warning labels should be placed either on the tanning machines or in the salons in order to caution tanners of the possible dangers.In addition，the committee decided that stricter regulations and classifications were critical to make the machines safer.At this time the machines are categorized as FDA Class 1 devices，the ones that are least likely to cause harm.In case the FDA decided to change their classification from Class 1 to Class 2，as advised by the panel，the FDA could limit the levels of radiation the machines emit.Class 2 devices include X­ray machines and powered wheelchairs.

    Getting a tan，whether from a tanning bed or the sun，increases the risk of developing skin cancer.Last year，the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC)declared tanning beds as “carcinogenic(致癌的)to humans”．It was discovered that young individuals in their teens and 20s who use tanning beds on a regular basis have a 75 per cent higher risk of suffering from melanoma(黑素瘤)，the deadliest form of skin cancer.According to the American Cancer Society，melanoma accounted for nearly 69,000 cases of skin cancer in 2009 and will account for most (about 8,650)of the 11,590 mortality cases due to skin cancer each year.

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    A new collection of photos brings an unsuccessful Antarctic voyage back to life. Frank Hurley's pictures would be outstanding — undoubtedly first-rate photo-journalism — if they had been made last week. In fact, they were shot from 1914 through 1916, most of them after a disastrous ship wreck (海滩) by a cameraman who had no reasonable expectation of survival Many of the images were stored in an ice chest under freezing water, in the damaged wooden ship.

    The ship was the Endurance a small tight Norwegian-built three-master that was intended to take Sir Ermest Shackleton and a small crew of seamen and scientists, 27 men in all, to the southernmost shore of Antarctica's Weddell Sm. From that point Shackleton wanted to force a passage by dog sled across the continent. The journey was intended to achieve more than what Captain Robert Falcon Scott had done. Captain Scott had reached the South Pole early in 1912 but had died with his four companions on the march back.

    As writer Caroline Alexander makes clear in her forceful and well-researched story The Endurance、adventuring was then a thoroughly commercial effort Scott's last journey, completed as he lay in a tent dying of cold and hunger, caught the world's imagination, and a film made in his honor drew crowds Shackleton, a onetime British merchant-navy officer who had got to within 100 miles of the South Pole in 1908,started a business before his 1914 voyage to make money from movie and still photography. Frank Hurley，a confident and gifted Australian photographer who knew the Antarctic, was hired to make the images most of which have never before been published.

    I come from a large family of nine brothers and sisters, and all of us have kids of our own. On each Christmas night, our entire family gathers at my oldest sister's home, exchanging gifts, watching the nativity skit put on by the smaller children, eating, singing and enjoying a visit from Santa himself.

    The Christmas of 1988, my husband Bob and I had four children. Peter was eleven, Leigh-Ann was nine, Laura was six and Matthew was two. When Santa arrived, Matthew parked himself on Santa's lap and pretty much remained dazzled by him for the rest of the evening. Anyone who had their picture taken with Santa that Christmas also had their picture taken with little Matthew.

    Little did any of us know how precious those photos with Santa and Matthew would become. Five days after Christmas, our sweet little Matthew died in an accident at home. We were lucky to have strong support from our families and friends to help us through. I learned that the first year after a death is the hardest, as there are so many firsts to get through without your loved one. Birthdays and special occasions become sad, instead of joyous.

    When our first Christmas without Matthew approached, it was hard for me to get into the holiday spirit. Bob and I could hardly face putting up the decorations or shopping for special gifts for everyone. But we went through the motions for Peter, Leigh-Ann and Laura. Then, something extraordinary happened to raise our spirits when we didn't think it was possible.

    We were just finishing dinner when we heard a knock on the front door. When we went to answer it, no one was there. However, on the front porch was a card and gift. We opened the card and read that the gift-giver wanted to remain anonymous; he or she just wanted to help us get through a rough time by cheering us up.

    In the gift bag was a cassette of favorite Christmas music, which was in a little cardboard Christmas tree. The card described it as being "a cartridge in a pine tree," a twist on the "partridge in a pear tree" verse in the song, "The Twelve Days of Christmas." We thought that it was a very clever gift, and the thoughtfulness of our "elf"(精灵) touched our hearts. We put the cassette in our player and, song by song, the spirit of Christmas began to warm our hearts.

    That was the beginning of a series of gifts from the clever giver, one for each day until Christmas. Each gift followed the theme of "The Twelve Days of Christmas" in a creative way. The kids especially liked "seven swans a-swimming," which was a basket of swan-shaped soaps plus passes to the local swimming pool, giving the kids something to look forward to when the warm days of spring arrived. "Eight maids a-milking" included eight bottles of chocolate milk, eggnog and regular milk in glass bottles with paper faces, handmade aprons and caps. Every day was something very special. The "five golden rings" came one morning just in time for breakfast — five glazed doughnuts just waiting to be eaten.

    We would get calls from our family, neighbors and friends who would want to know what we had received that day. Together, we would chuckle at the ingenuity and marvel at the thoughtfulness as we enjoyed each surprise. We were so caught up in the excitement and curiosity of what would possibly come next, that our grief didn't have much of a chance to rob us of the spirit of Christmas. What our elf did was absolutely miraculous.

    Each year since then, as we decorate our Christmas tree, we place on it the decorations we received that Christmas while we play the song "The Twelve Days of Christmas." We give thanks for our elf who was, we finally realized, our very own Christmas angel. We never did find out who it was, although we have our suspicions. We actually prefer to keep it that way. It remains a wondrous and magical experience - as mysterious and blessed as the very first Christmas.

    Edward Latter, five, thought his dog Morse was gone for ever after cruel thieves took him away when the dog escaped from his home.

    The 10-month-old dog had been missing since December and the broken-hearted boy even wrote a heartbreaking letter to Santa and posted it to Lapland asking for his pal back for Christmas.

    A ￡10,000 reward was offered by millionaire Simon Cowell after he read about the horrific theft. Cowell said: "It's heartbreaking to see a little boy's Christmas ruined. Dogs are so important to many of us. We just hope it helps lead to the safe return of Morse."

    His parents, Amanda Hopkins and Richard Latter, had given up hope of ever seeing their pet again, until they got a call on Friday night. A couple 20 miles away from their home in Marden, Kent, had found a muddy dog walking through their street and thought it could be missing Morse. They brought the Morse in, washed him, and then called Mr Latter who was unsure until he was sent a photo, and then drove the family to the village of Meopham.

    The theatre carpenter, 40, said: "Amanda and I were still quite sceptical, but Edward saw him and recognised him straight away. He was absolutely over the moon. He said: 'I can't believe it, I have my best friend back. It's too late for Christmas but this is the best present ever.' We were still unsure if it was him though—as he wasn't responding to his name or coming to us."

    "We spent about an hour and half over there and we still were not sure, so we took him home to get his chip scanned. It was only when we took him to the vets on Saturday morning and got his chip scanned that we found out for sure. We instantly broke down in tears. We were just hugging each other, hugging Edward and hugging the dog." Added Richard.

    The family who found missing Morse said they hadn't yet heard from Simon Cowell about the ￡10,000 reward hut were happy to get him home.

Research spanning several decades demonstrates that you are more likely to think the information that is repeated to be true than the information you hear only once. You usually assume that if people put in effort to repeat a statement, this reflects the truth of the statement. This tendency-also called the truth effect-is a bias （偏见） that can lead you to draw incorrect conclusions. 

To what degree are people aware of the truth effect? This question was addressed in a paper in the journal Cognition early this year. 

In the critical study in this paper, participants did two sessions. In one session, they read about a hypothetical （虚构的） study in which they were exposed to some statements and then were asked whether both statements they had heard before as well as these new statements were true. They were asked to predict the proportion （比例） of each statement that would be judged as true. They did this both as a prediction of other people's performance as well as a prediction of how they would do in this study. 

At another session a few days later, participants actually performed this study, reading a set of 20 statements in the hypothetical study again and then judging the truth of altogether 40 statements, half of which were from the hypothetical study and the other half of which were new. 

This study did replicate the well known truth effect. People were more likely to judge statements they had seen before as true than statements that were new. Two interesting findings emerged from the prediction. First, participants tended to underestimate the size of the truth effect for everyone. T hat is, while they did expect some difference in judgments between the statements seen before and those that were new, they thought this difference would be smaller than it actually was. Second, participants more significantly underpredicted the truth effect for themselves compared to that for other people. 

This study is particularly important in light of the amount of misinformation present in social media. Many people have the power to influence public opinion about important matters. Flooding social media feeds with misinformation will lead people to believe this information is true just because it is stated. Recognizing that we are all susceptible to this influence of repeated information should lead us to mistrust our intuition （直觉） about what is true and to look up important information prior to using it to make important judgments and decisions.