A warm drink of milk before bed has long been the best choice for those wanting a good night's sleep. But now a study has found it really does help people nod off-if it is milked from a cow at night.

    Researchers have discovered that “night milk” contains more melatonin(褪黑激素), which has been proven to help people feel sleepy and reduce anxiety.

    The study, by researchers from Seoul, South Korea, involved mice being fed with dried milk powder made from cows milked both during the day and at night.

    Those given night milk, which contained 10 times the amount of melatonin, were less active and less anxious than those fed with the milk collected during daytime, according to the study published in The Journal of Medicinal Food.

    Night milk quickened the start of sleep and caused the mice to sleep longer.

    While the effect of cows milk harvested at different time has not been tested on humans up to now, taking melatonin drugs has been suggested to those who are struggling to fall asleep at night.

    Previous studies have also indicated that milk can be excellent for helping sleep because of the calcium content, which helps people to relax.

    Milk is also sugar-free and additive-free with nutritionists recommending skimmed milk as the best choice before bed as it is the least fattening. The more fat you take in before bedtime, the greater burden you will put on your body at night.

    Twelve years ago, Danny called me from a dark, damp subway station. “A baby!” he shouted. “Get down here, and flag down a police car or something.” By nature, Danny is a remarkably calm person, so when I felt his heart pounding through the phone line, I ran.

    When I got to the subway station, Danny was holding a light-brown-skinned baby, about a day old. The baby had been wrapped in an oversize black sweatshirt and left on the ground in a corner behind the gate.

    Three months later, Danny appeared in family court to give an account of finding the baby. Suddenly, the judge asked, “Would you be interested in adopting this baby?” The question stunned everyone in the courtroom, except Danny, who answered, simply, “Yes.”

    “But I know it's not that easy,” he said.

    “Well, it can be,” assured the judge before barking out orders to allow me to be a parent-to-be.

    My first reaction, when I heard, went something like: “Are you crazy? How could you say yes without consulting me?”

    In three years as a couple, we had never discussed adopting a child. I was an ambitious playwright working as a part-time word processor. Danny was a respected yet wildly underpaid social worker. We had a roommate, who slept in our living room, to help pay the rent.

    We knew how many challenges couples usually faced when they wanted to adopt. And while Danny had patience and selflessness, I didn't know how to change a diaper(尿布), let alone nurse a child. I didn't trust the system and was sure there would be obstacles. Also, I couldn't handle parenthood. So I promised myself I wouldn't get attached.

    The caretaker held him and then placed him in my arms. But when the baby stared up at me, with all the innocence and hope he represented, I, like Danny, was completely hooked.

    What will you think of when it comes to “Hong Kong” and “great swimming”? Shopping sure, but swimming pool? Turns out, along with all its other attractions, Hong Kong is loaded with wonderful pools.

    The Ritz－Carlton

    The pool at the Ritz－Carlton is breathtaking, thanks to the view, the altitude and, of course, the swim. On the 118th floor at 484 meters above the street in the tallest building in Hong Kong, it's the world's highest swimming pool. The ceiling and walls are made up of 144 LED screens displaying coral reefs and other natural scenes.

    W Hotel Hong Kong

    If you have only one nice swimsuit, save it for the W Hotel Hong Kong. Only people living in this hotel can enjoy this wonderful pool, which is Hong Kong's highest rooftop pool. The hotel's signature WET deck is famous for stylish and occasionally wild poolside parties in summer. WET also features a good cocktail bar and a Jacuzzi.

    Hotel Indigo

    One of Hong Kong's unique experiences is swimming in Hotel Indigo's glass bottom pool. The pool protrudes from the hotel, allowing people below to see swimmers and the swimmers to do laps while checking out the traffic below. The pool is smaller compared to other local grand hotels and only available to the hotel guests.

    Four Seasons Hotel

    The Four Seasons Hotel gorgeous infinity pool overlooks Victoria Harbor. Even cooler, the hotel pipes in underwater music, making the swim much more wonderful, or annoying, depending on your taste in music. The pool is open only to hotel guests.

    For centuries, people wondered how big the Earth was. Unfortunately, although the Earth was flat, no one was able to figure out its size. Gradually, however, people began to realize that the Earth was really round.

    Then, in the third century BC(2,300 years ago), a Greek man named Eratosthenes had an idea. Eratosthenes was sure that the Earth was a sphere. He used the sun and geometry(几何学) to figure out the size of the Earth. He calculated that the circumference(圆周) of the Earth was 28,600 miles(46,000 kilometers). The true size of the Earth is 25,000 miles(40,000 kilometers).

    Eratosthenes' measurement was wrong, but it was very close to the truth.

    For many centuries after Eratoshenes lived, people made maps of the Earth. However, they did not know very much about the world outside of Europe, Asia, and North Africa. Mapmakers could not draw accurate maps of the Earth until people began traveling around the world in the fifteenth century, mapping small areas each time. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, people began making correct maps of countries, but the first accurate maps of the world were not made until the 1890s.

    Maps today are reliable(可依靠的), inexpensive, and easy to understand. People depend on maps every day. What would our lives be like without them?

    Kay and Charles Giddens sold their home to start a bed and breakfast. Four years later, the couple now dishes out banana pancake breakfasts, cleans toilets, serves homemade cookies to guests in a bed and breakfast surrounded by trees on a mountain known for colorful sunsets.

    “Do I miss the freeways? Do I miss the traffic? Do I miss the trees? No,” says Ms. Giddens. “This is a phenomenon that's fairly widespread. A lot of people are rethinking their lives and figuring out what they want to do.”

    Simple living ranges from cutting down on weeknight activities to sharing housing, living closer to work and commuting(通勤) less, avoiding shopping malls, borrowing books from the library instead of buying them, and taking a cut in pay to work at a more pleasurable job.

    Vicki Robin, a writer, tells us how she deals with the changes in her budget, now far less than what she used to make.

    “You become conscious of where your money is going and how valuable it is,”Ms. Robin says. “You tend not to use thing up. You cook at home rather than eat out. You find your life is not a mess anymore, and you discover your living costs have gone way down.”

    Janet Luhrs, a lawyer, quit her job after giving birth and leaving her daughter with a babysitter for two weeks.“It was not the way I wanted to raise my kids,”she says.“Simplicity is not just about saving money ; it's about me sitting down every night with my kids to a candlelit dinner with classical music.”

    Ms. Luhrs now edits a magazines called Simple Living, which publishes tips on how to buy recycled furniture and shoes, and organize potluck（家常便饭）dinners instead of fancy receptions.

    “Simplicity is about conscious living and creating the life you want. The less stuff you buy, the less money goes out the door, and the less money you have to earn,” Ms. Luhrs explains.

    Airbags, now found in almost every vehicle, have saved countless lives and largely reduced the severity of injuries in crashes. Similar technology could greatly reduce broken hips (髋部) resulting from a fall, something most seniors fear.

    Dr. Robert Buckman and his start-up company, Active Protective in Allentown, Pennsylvania, has developed a promising solution, a wearable airbag that can protect hip bones in the event of a fall. The idea was the result of Dr. Buckman's years as a doctor at Temple University. He noticed how many elderly people were being brought into hospitals with broken hip due to falls, and how they often never completely recovered from the injuries. He started to ask what he could do for these people, and that was when he started trying to figure out whether there was a way of helping people who were at the highest risk of falling and suffering these kinds of injuries.

    The device is worn much like a regular belt, but on the outside of the clothing, and it includes sensors that monitor the movement of hips. If the device detects that the person, is falling, an airbag opens before the person hits the ground, cushioning the fall. When the wearer hits the ground, the bag reduces the force to the hip bones by 90 percent, enough to avoid the majority of hip injuries.

    With one out of every three people aged 65 and older suffering serious falls each year, Active Protective has a big market for its wearable device. It also has the potential to sizably reduce hip - related health care expenses: Hip injuries among the elderly cost the US health care system in 2012 $30 billion, which doesn't include the long-term care expenses associated with the high percentage of patients that can no longer live independently.