Today many people like growing plants at home because the plants help make the indoor environment beautiful and healthy. However, sometimes people may be too busy to remember to water their plants. If you have the same problem, don't worry. Designer Alastair Crompton can help you solve the problem with his amazing product-Plant Pod. It can water itself without any help.

    The Plant Pod is a self-watering container (容器) for small to medium-sized plants inside the house. Alastair Crompton makes it use a very simple process to provide the plant with the water it needs every day. With a Plant Pod, people no longer need to worry about how much water is perfect for their plants to grow. The water in the Plant Pod is enough to last for at least two weeks. So if people are away from home on a short holiday, they don't need to ask their relatives or neighbours to look after their plants. Won't it be great to see your plants welcome you when you are back home after one or two weeks?

    We each have memory(记忆力).That's why we can still remember things after a long time. Some people have very good memories and they can easily learn many things by heart, but some people can only remember things when they say or do them again and again. Many of the great men of the world have got surprising memories.

    A good memory is a good help in learning a language. Everybody learns his mother language when he is a small child. He hears the sounds, remember them and then he learns to speak. Some children are living with their parents in foreign countries. They can learn two languages as easily as one because they hear, remember and speak two languages every day. In school it is not easy to learn a foreign language because the students have so little time for it, and they are busy with other subjects, too. But your memory will become better and better when you do more and more exercise.

    Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star is a lovely song for children, but it has two misunderstandings (误解). First, stars aren't little. Some may be Earth-sized, but most are bigger than Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system (太阳系). Second, they don't twinkle; they shine. And the brightness and color of the light from each star provide information about its temperature, size and even its age. viewing the stars from Earth is a bit like looking at them through a water filter (过滤器) because the air is thick compared to the emptiness of space. What is more, air is always moving, so starlight appears to be moving, too. The air also makes stars appear dimmer (暗淡的) than they would be if we could see them from space.

    If you stop and look at the sky carefully on a dark and moonless night, it's easy to find color differences among stars. The color of a star is a signal of its surface temperature. The hottest stars are blue, and the next hottest are white. Yellow stars like the sun are next, while red stars are the coolest of the visible (可见的) stars. Many red stars are so dim that people can't see them at all, and some stars hardly send out any light at all. One reason that stars different in brightness is that hotter stars produce more energy than cooler ones, but another important reason is that some are much bigger than others.

Some stars appear brighter to humans simply because they're closer. Astronomers rank (排列) the brightness of stars which are seen from Earth by giving them a name known as magnitude (光度) —the smaller the magnitude, the brighter the object. They have also designed a number that ranks stars according to how bright they are when compared to each other. With a magnitude of minus 26.7, the sun is the brightest object in the sky.

    An atlas is-a book of maps. Atlases are made with different kinds of information about different parts and areas of a country or the world. They are prepared for desk use or travel use.

    Desk atlases are made for different groups of people with different needs. For example, students may use desk atlases to help learn Geography, and other people may use desk atlases to study a place. A popular type of the latest atlas shows the recent fact of the world. New atlases are often carefully produced to help people learn about the changes, such as name changes, boundary(界) changes and other important new information. A desk atlas can also have some different maps of the same place. For example, an atlas may include maps showing population and important products of a place.

    Travel atlases usually show the information about both natural and man-made features(特点). So it is not surprising to find universities, airports, forests, rivers, roads as well as cities, towns and villages in them. A travel atlas is often the first thing people need when they want to start a trip in a strange place.

    It often has a map of a whole country, and a map with more special information of each important place in the country. Take the atlas of the United States as an example, it often has a map of the whole country and then a map of each of the fifty states.

    A travel atlas may also point out the beautiful natural places. In the USA, the atlas may include national parks such as the Yellowstone National Park and some others to show the beauty of nature and interesting places to tourists.

Why Do People Blink (眨眼) Their Eyes?

    People blink their eyes tens of thousands of times every day. Scientists have long believed blinking was an involuntary movement and served mainly to keep the eyeballs wet. But a new study suggests it has a more important purpose.

    An international team of scientists from the University of California at Berkeley studied the blinking of human eyelids. The journal Current Biology published their findings. The team said they found that blinking "repositions our eyeballs so we can stay focused" on what we are seeing. They said that when we blink our eyelids, the eyes roll back into their sockets—the bony area that surrounds and protects the eyes. However, the researchers found the eyes don't always return to the same position (位置). They said this causes the brain to tell the eye muscles (肌肉) to reorganize our eyesight.

    Gerrit Maus is the lead writer of the report. He serves as an assistant professor of psychology at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Maus said, "Our eye muscles are quite sluggish (迟缓的) and imprecise (不精确的), so the brain needs to constantly adapt (改编) its motor signals to make sure our eyes are pointing where they should be. Our findings suggested that the brain measures the difference in what we see before and after a blink, and orders the eye muscles to make the needed corrections." The researchers said that without such corrections our surroundings would appear unclear and even jumpy. They said the movement acts "like a steadicam (摄影稳定器) of the mind."

    The researchers said they asked volunteers to sit in a dark room while storing at a small dot on a flat surface. They used special cameras to follow the volunteer's blinks and eye movements. After each blink, the dot was moved one centimeter to the right. The volunteers did not notice this, but the brain did. It followed the movement and directed the eye muscles to refocus on the dot. After the dot was moved in this way 30 times, the volunteers' eyes changed their focus to the place where they predicted it would be.

    Professor Maus said. "Even though the volunteers did not consciously register that the dot had moved, their brains did, and adjusted (调整)with the corrective eye movements. These findings add to our understanding of how the brain constantly adapts to (适应) changes directing our eye muscles to correct for errors in our bodies' own hardware."