A telescope, called Gaia, is being designed by astronomers in Europe, and it couldn't be more different from Pan-STARRS, which is another telescope being designed. While Pan-STARRS will be looking for asteroids (小行星) and comets headed for Earth, Gaia will be looking at our entire galaxy (银河系).

    Gaia is designed to draw a map of the Milky Way, our home galaxy. Just as a map of your town gives you a picture of where things are located, Gaia's map of the galaxy will tell astronomers where the stars are. Over five years, Gaia will observe (观察) about a billion stars and other objects in our galaxy. Each object will be observed about 70 times.

    Gaia will be sent into space connected to a rocket. It contains two telescopes, each focused at a different angle (角度). These two telescopes act like Gaia's “eyes”. The reason why humans can see things in 3D is that we have two eyes focused on the same object, at slightly different angles. By using two telescopes like eyes, Gaia can produce the first 3D map of the positions of the stars it views.

    Gaia, which is to be sent into space, will be a powerful telescope. If you were to use it on Earth, for example, you could stand 600 miles away from your best friends and still get a clear picture of their hair.

    Gaia is one of more than a dozen telescopes being designed by scientists right now. The next generation of telescopes will reveal new parts of our universe that will seem surprising. The universe, with all its planets, stars and other strange objects, is a puzzle with pieces that we can see by using powerful telescopes.

    It is commonly believed that all over the world,boys and girls attend a mixed school,where they study together. But boys' schools are the perfect place to teach young men to express their emotions and involve them in activities such as arty,dance and music.

    Always boys at single-sex schools were said to be more likely to get involved in cultural and artistic activities that helped develop their emotional expressiveness,rather than feeling they had to correspond to（和…相符）the "boy code" of hiding their emotions to be a "real man".

    Surprisingly,the findings of the study go against received wisdom that boys do better when taught alongside girls.

    George Car,headmaster of Eton,warned that boys were being failed by the British education system because it had become too focused on girls.He criticized teachers for failing to recognize that boys are actually more emotional than girls.

    The research argued that boys often perform badly in mixed schools because they become discouraged when girls do better earlier in speaking and reading skills.

    But in single-sex schools teachers can adjust lessons to boys' learning style,letting them move around the classroom and getting them to compete in teams to prevent boredom,wrote the study's author,Abigail James,of the University of Virginia.

    Teachers could encourage boys to enjoy reading and writing with "boy-focused" approaches such as themes and characters that appeal to them.Because boys generally have more acute vision,learn best through touch,and are physically more active,they need to be given"'hands-on" lessons where they are allowed to walk around."Boys in mixed schools view classical music as feminine（女性的）and prefer the modem genre（类型）in which violence and sexism are major themes,"James wrote.

    Single-sex education also made it less likely that boys would feel that they had to be "masterful and in charge" in relationships."In mixed schools,boys feel forced to act like men before they understand themselves well enough to know what that means,"the study reported.

    Even though it's not the most popular time of year to get married, I allow my thoughts to wander and consider the most unusual marriage habits across the world.

    In some parts of India it is believed that ghosts can stay with certain people of the living world. In general, girls who are born with a baby tooth and girls who are very ugly or have some facial damage are believed to be owned by ghosts. The only way to free from the ghosts is for the girl to marry an animal, typically a goat or a dog. She is free to marry a man later on, when the ghosts are proven to be freed from her. I wonder who makes this decision and how they come to their conclusion.

    In Korea, it is a custom for grooms to request that their successfully married friends carve them wooden ducks as a symbol of great marriage. Hand-carving a wooden duck can't be easy. This leads me to wonder why it's a duck and not another animal.

    Imagine being as young as 5 and already your parents are sending you to a fat farm where you are forced to eat too much food until you vomit (呕吐). Then, the old woman watching you eat forces you to eat that vomit. This is not a TV show. This is really happening in some parts of Africa. Men there want women fat; the fatter the better. It doesn't matter if it ruins their health or make them live shorter lives. All that matters is that the woman is as large as possible in order to sell her for a high price when she reaches the age for marrying.

    A nine-year-old kid was sitting at his desk when suddenly there was a puddle（水潭、泥坑） between his feet and the front of his trousers was wet. He thought his heart was going to stop because he couldn't possibly imagine how this had happened. It had never happened before, and he knew that when the boys found out he would never hear the end of it. When the girls found out, they would never speak to him again as long as he lived.

    He prayed this prayer, "Dear God, I need help now! Five minutes from now I'm dead meat!" He looked up from his prayer and here came the teacher with a look in her eyes that said he had been discovered. As the teacher was walking toward him, a classmate named Susie was carrying a goldfish bowl full of water. Susie tripped （绊倒） in front of the teacher and dumped （倒） the bowl of water in the boy's lap. The boy pretended to be angry, but all the while was saying to himself, "Thank you. Lord!"

    Now all of a sudden, instead of being the object of ridicule, the boy was the object of sympathy. The teacher rushed him downstairs and gave him gym shorts to put on while his trousers dried out. All the other children were on their hands and knees cleaning up around his desk. The sympathy was wonderful. But as life would have it, the ridicule that should have been his had been transferred （转移） to someone else+—Susie. She tried to help, but they told her to get out.

    When school was over, the boy walked over to Susie and whispered, "You did that on purpose, didn't you?" Susie whispered back, "I wet my trousers once, too!"

    Give yourself a test. Which way is the wind blowing? How many kinds of wildflowers can be seen from your front door? If your awareness is as sharp as it could be, you'll have no trouble answering these questions.

    Most of us observed much more as children than we do as adults. A child's day is filled with fascination, newness and wonder. Curiosity gave us all a natural awareness. But distinctions that were sharp to us as children become unclear; we are numb(麻木的）to new stimulation(刺激), new ideas. Relearning the art of seeing the world around us is quite simple, although it takes practice and requires breaking some bad habits.

    The first step in awakening senses is to stop predicting what we are going to see and feel before it occurs. This blocks awareness. One chilly night when I was hiking in the Rocky Mountains with some students, I mentioned that we were going to cross a mountain stream. The students began complaining about how cold it would be. We reached the stream, and they unwillingly walked ahead. They were almost knee-deep when they realized it was a hot spring. Later they all admitted they'd felt cold water at first.

    Another block to awareness is the obsession(痴迷) many of us have with naming things. I saw bird watchers who spotted a bird, immediately looked it up in field guides, and said, a "ruby-crowned kinglet" and checked it off. They no longer paid attention to the bird and never learned what it was doing.

    The pressures of "time" and "destination" are further blocks to awareness. I encountered many hikers who were headed to a distant camp-ground with just enough time to get there before dark. It seldom occurred to them to wander a bit, to take a moment to see what's around them. I asked them what they'd seen. "Oh, a few birds," they said. They seemed bent on their destinations.

    Nature seems to unfold to people who watch and wait. Next time you take a walk, no matter where it is, take in all the sights, sounds and sensations. Wander in this frame of mind and you will open a new dimension to your life.

    Many of us have had this experience: we lie down in a bed other than our own, perhaps at a friend's house or in a hotel room, and find it difficult or impossible to fall asleep. Is it because the bed is uncomfortable? Maybe, but perhaps there can be other reasons.

    According to a new study published in Current Biology, a significant reason is what the scientists call "first night effect". They believe that one side of the brain acts as a "night watch" to warn us about potential dangers. It forces us to stay awake on the first night in a new environments.

    For the study, 35 young volunteers were asked to sleep in a sleep lab for several days. Meanwhile, researchers watched their brain activities.

    According to the researchers, on their first night, the left brain was more active than the right brain and people had a hard time sleeping. However, left-brain activities decreased as days went by, falling even to the point of complete calm. In this process, the participants got an increasingly better sleep experience.

    The findings suggest that the different rhythms of the sides of the brain affect our sleep. When the two sides work differently, the balance between them is broken. Thus, the brain can't relax and is sensitive to anything strange in the surroundings, just as it is in the daytime.

    "At some level, the brain is continuing to analyze things, even though you are not aware of the analysis, " US professor Jerome Siegel told Smithsonian

    "If something unusual happens - if a door opens or you hear a key in a lock --you can be alert, even though the intensity of the stimulus (刺激强度) is quite low." More surprisingly, this phenomenon is similar to the way some animals sleep.

    The researchers think that it is the result of evolution (进化), and works to protect us in potentially dangerous environments.

    If you have ever had what you think is "first night effect", researchers suggest that you bring your own pillow or sleep in a room similar to your bedroom next time you sleep away from home.