For many people around the world, a subway journey means speeding from one dull station to the next, surrounded by too many uncomfortable, impatient people. But on the Moscow Metro, taking the subway is like walking through a national heritage site. Depending on where you get off, you'll receive a brief course in architectural movements and face colorful glass windows, marble(大理石) columns, gilded(鎏金的) mosaics and painted scenes from Russian history.

    “These extraordinarily beautiful places are unlike any metro station I've ever seen, “says Vancouver-based photographer David Burdeny.

    When Burdeny, who himself has a master's degree in architecture, first found out about Moscow's metro stations, he was struck by the work of art. In all, he has photographed 20 of the most beautiful stations.

    Burdeny had originally planned to focus on Russian stations more generally, taking photos of examples in both St. Petersburg and Moscow.

    “But when I saw the stations in Moscow, they just completely blew away the St. Petersburg ones,” he says.

    Shooting in the subway sounds simple, but it is not without challenges. For one thing, Burdeny had to figure out a way to access them between 00:30 a.m. and 5:30 a.m., when the stations were closed.

    In the end, he settled on Arbatskaya Metro Station, whose vaulted(拱状的) arches he found the most beautiful. But it also represented a challenge he was not sure if he was able to overcome: conveying the hugeness of the spaces. The Arbatskaya platform, for example, stretches 820 feet.

    “Some of the arches are quite long,” he says. “When you enter them, they're just so completely grand.”

    Born and raised in a digital age, today's young people are generally tech savvy (技术娴熟的). But when it comes to basic life skills, they're less capable than the older generation.

    According to a recent study, 69 percent of 18 to 24-year-olds in the UK have no idea how to bleed a radiator(暖气片换水). About 35 percent of them don't know how to sew on a button, while about 11 percent don't understand how to change a light bulb or iron clothes.

    It appears young people are losing the skills older generations took for granted. In fact, the problem is shared by young people in the United States. According to a report by Forbes in 2014, most millennial (千禧一代) drivers don't know how to check their tire pressure. Cooking is another basic life skill that has been dropped, as millennials are much more likely to order food deliveries than previous generations.

    Technology may be to blame for this generational gap. Skills at using phones and computers are the ones valued these days, and the practical skills are now seen as functions that can be easily outsourced (外包). Indeed, improvements in technology have made young people unfamiliar with many basic life skills. For example, with GPS always at hand, young people have had no need to learn how to read physical maps.

    However, this change has raised concerns among many people. “If you have your master's degree and you can't live within your means or go home from your job and feed yourself a nutritious (有营养的) meal, you're not a complete graduate,” Chris Moore, a professor from Brigham Young University, US, told Huff Post.

    That's why there's an increasing call for the return of “home ec” in the US, short for home economics, which teaches basic life skills like cooking and how to do laundry. It was very popular in the early 20th century, but was later taken out of schools and universities because of budget(预算) cuts. But recently, home ec was reintroduced in a small number of schools and universities.

    “The educational system would work better if every academic class had a practical course that applied the theory to do something regular people do in real life,” Robert Frost, instructor and flight controller at NASA, wrote on Quora, according to Huff post.

    People all need friends because nobody wants to be lonely and a friend can help you in good and bad times. You have made friends since childhood, but you still don't know who your true friends are. Here are some signs to tell you if your friend is a true friend:

Always honest

    Honesty is important to keep a relationship alive. A true friend always tells you the truth. It may be hard sometimes but lying can destroy a friendship. It is important that your friend speaks honestly and never makes up stories.

    There are always periods in your life when you have problems or difficulties. A true friend will always have time to listen to your problems and give advice. It may not be able to offer a solution to your problems but the fact that your friend made time to listen is a sign he/she cares for you. Your friend is not a true friend if he/she can never make time for you when you are in trouble. You also need to be reasonable and accept that your friend also has other things to do so he/she can't always listen immediately to your problems.

Always respectful (尊敬的)

    A true friend will always respect your opinion no matter whether he/she agrees or not. Your true friend may disagree but never insists that he/she is correct.

Always understanding

    It is possible that some problems will arise between you and your friend. A true friend will always be forgiving (体谅的) and understanding even if it isn't his/her fault. We are all different people and we all make mistakes. A true friend is always forgiving and understanding because he/she doesn't want to take the risk of losing his/her best friend.

    As any plane passenger will confirm, a crying baby is almost impossible to ignore, no matter how hard you try. Now scientists believe they may have worked out why. A baby's cry pulls at the heartstrings(扣人心弦) in a way while other cries don't, researchers found.

    Researchers found that a baby's cry can trigger unique emotional responses in the brain, making it impossible for us to ignore them—whether we are parents or not. Other types of cries, including calls of animals in great pain, fail to get the same response—suggesting the brain is programmed to respond specifically to a baby' cry.

    A team of Oxford University scientists scanned the brains of 28 men and women as they listened to a variety of calls and cries. After 100 milliseconds—roughly the time to blink(眨眼)—two parts of the brain that respond to emotion lit up. Their response to a baby's cry was particularly strong. The response was seen in both men and women—even if they had no children.

    Researcher Dr Christine Parsons said, “You might read that men should just notice a baby and step over it and not see it, but it's not true. There is a special processing in men and women, which makes sense from an evolutionary view that both men and women would be responding to these cries.” The study was in people who were not parents, yet they are all responding at 100ms to these particular cries, so this might be a fundamental response present in all of us regardless of parental status.

    Fellow researcher Katie Young said it may take a bit longer for someone to recognize their own child's cries because they need to do more “fine-grained analysis”. The team had previously found that our reactions speed up when we hear a baby crying. Adults performed better on computer games when they heard the sound of a baby crying than after they heard recordings of adults crying.

    The plan: turn Mars into a blue world with streams and green fields, and then fill it with creatures (生物) from the earth. This idea may sound like something from a science fiction (科幻小说), but it is actually being taken seriously by many researchers.

    This suggested future for the "red planet" will be the main topic for discussion at an international conference hosted by NASA (美国宇航局) this week. Leading researchers as well as science fiction writers will attend the event. It comes as NASA is preparing a multi billion dollar Mars research programme. "Turning Mars into a little earth has long been a topic in science fiction," said Dr Michael Meyer, NASA's senior scientist for astrobiology (太空生物学). "Now, with scientists exploring the reality, we can ask what are the real possibilities of changing Mars."

    Most scientists agree that Mars could be turned into a little earth, although much time and money would be needed to achieve this goal.

    But many experts are shocked by the idea. "We are destroying our own world at an unbelievable speed and now we are talking about ruining another planet," said Paul Murdin, of the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, UK. Over the past months, scientists have become increasingly confident they will find Martian life forms. Europe and America's robot explorers have found proof that water, mixed with soil, exists in large amounts on the planet.

    In addition, two different groups of scientists announced on March 28 that they had found signs of methane (甲烷) in the Martian atmosphere (大气). The gas is a waste product of living creatures and could be produced by microbes (微生物) living in the red planet's soil.

    But scientists such as Dr Lisa Pratt, a biologist at Indiana University, say that these microbes will be put in danger by the little earth project. "Before we have even discovered if there is life on Mars, we are talking about carrying out projects that would destroy all these native life forms, all the strange microbes that we hope to find buried in the soil," said Dr Pratt. This view is shared by Monica Grady, a planetary scientist at the Natural History Museum, London. "We cannot risk starting a global experiment that would wipe out the precious information we are looking for." she said, "This is just wrong."

Earthquakes are common natural disasters. No matter where you are, knowing how to protect yourself and your family during an earthquake is necessary.

Some experts believe that when you feel the ground is shaking, drop down, take cover under a desk and hold on. Most earthquake injuries are the result of being hit by something falling on you. You should stay indoors until the shaking stops. If you are outdoors, don't stay near buildings, trees or power lines. Many people think that in case of an earthquake, they should "get under something" like a doorway or desk, in order to avoid being hurt by falling objects. Rescue experts now say this is the wrong thing to do. For example, in the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, they found hundreds of children in schools, crushed by their desks. However, they could have survived by lying in the aisle (通道，走道) next to their desks.

So find a nice piece of furniture, a chair, a sofa, and lie down, or curl up next to it. A falling roof may compact (压实) the furniture, but will still leave a space for you to survive next to it. This also holds true if you are in a hotel room, especially at night. Get off the bed, and lie down next to it.

In San Francisco's 1989 earthquake, the upper freeway fell on the lower one. People who drove along were crushed in their cars. But they had time to get out and lie down next to their cars. Yes, their cars were crushed, but there was space from top to bottom next to the vehicles for people to survive and wait a rescue.

Doorways and stairways are very unsafe. Stay away from those.

What can we do to keep ourselves safe? Staying calm is the first and most important rule when facing accidents.