What would you say if we told you that you could learn to speak a new language in only 7 days? Pretty unbelievable right? But how could it be? To find out,we spoke to David-one of our brave Babbel learners—to see how the Babbel app successfully got him speaking Norwegian(挪威语)in just one week.

How much time did you learn each day?

    I didn't need to give my entire life over to learning Norwegian. Each Babbel lesson takes only 15 minutes, and I set myself the achievable aim of finishing three Babbel lessons daily.This took only 45minutes each day.

How did the Babbel app help you learn so quickly?

    The Babbel app has a course plan for beginners that taught me how to make sentences in Norwegian within the first few days. Then I was able to personalize my learning by selecting single-topic lessons on eating, drinking, music, culture, traveling and so on. This allowed me to quickly enlarge my vocabulary!

    This way of learning kept me highly active,and made sure I wasn't bored to tears with grammar practice that we all remember from school!

    “After 7 days I was able to introduce myself in Norwegian,talk about my hobbies and interests, and most importantly,communicating with a native Norwegian speaker in a real conversation and I could even play a joke or two!”

    Would you introduce this app to others?

    Certainly! Babbel has 14 languages to choose from so if you're thinking about brushing up on your German for a business trip, or learning a bit of Portuguese (葡萄牙语) for next year's summer vacation, you'll be happy to hear that you only need an app, 7 days of learning to get you conversational.

Yawning（哈欠）sends out certain messages—either “Oh, this movie is boring" or "I probably need to get some sleep". But did you know that a yawn can also help your brain to cool down when it is so overheated?

    A new study, led by a research team of Princeton University, has indicated（表明）that yawning could be the brain's natural way of regulating temperature. People yawn more often when the temperature outdoors is lower than their body temperature but are less likely to yawn when it is hotter outdoors, according to Sciencedaily.com.

    The research team did an experiment on 160 people, 80 in summer and 80 in winter, to examine how often they yawned at different air temperatures. The study found that people yawned more often in winter than in summer. Scientists say that when the air temperature is lower outside the body, there is heat exchange between the overheated brain and the cool air. But when the air temperature is higher than or equal to the body, people are less likely to yawn because the hot air they breathe in will make the brain even hotter.

    When people yawn, their jaw is also stretched, which increases blood flow and may also help cool the brain.

    The study showed that the amount someone yawned could be related to the amount of time they spent outside. The longer they spent outside in summer, the less they yawn. Nearly 40 percent of participants yawned within their first five minutes outside, but after that the percentage was reduced to less than 10 percent.

    However, the result was the opposite in winter. The number of people who yawned increased when they spent more than five minutes outdoors. But the change was only slight compared to summertime.

    According to Gallup, this is the first report to show that yawning frequencies(频率) change depending on season. This could help us to understand better the way our brains work. It may also help us understand the reason why frequent yawning can sometimes be a sign of brain disease.

    Kids are natural scientists. That may be why they ask so many questions.

    Younger kids take up science and math with amazing enthusiasm, yet as they get older they often lose their excitement. Children look on scientific exploration as play, but as they get older they start to connect it with big heavy books, long worksheets and a lot of really confusing words.

    What a tragedy! We had their attention, they were listening, they were participating, they were learning and then we lost it to boredom.

    We need our kids to play more. More play brings up basic scientific concepts(概念). Being familiar with basic scientific concepts brings about exploration which leads to research. Once they are researching, they are completely into the learning.

    My boys built a small 9­hole golf course next to our driveway one day. It was a great product of science. They dug out the holes and channels to guide the golf ball. They played with architecture(建筑学)with a series of pipes they had found in the garage. They tested speed and momentum(动量)by creating one of the holes across the driveway. They experienced biology when deciding which front yard plants could be used as a part of the course and which needed to be pulled up.

    If I had sent them out to the yard to build a 9­hole golf course, it would have never happened. It was because it was their idea that it worked. I try to tell them some of the concepts after the fact. When they ask about something, I try to relate it back to something they have built, experienced, or felt. I try to give them a vocabulary around what they already know.

    An afternoon can change the way kids look at the world. Not bad for a day of play.

    Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you. Well, ni­hao. (Laughter) It is such a pleasure and an honor to be here with all of you at this great university, so thank you so much for having me. I'm here today because I know that our future depends on connections like these among young people like you across the world.

    That's why when my husband and I travel abroad, we don't just visit palaces and parliaments(国会) and meet with heads of countries. We also come to schools like this one to meet with students like you, because we believe that relationships between countries aren't just about relationships between governments or leaders—they're about relationships between people, particularly young people. So we view study abroad programs not just as an educational chance for students, but also as an active part of America's foreign policy.

    Through the wonders of modern technology, our world is more connected than ever before. Ideas can cross oceans with the click of a mouse. Companies can do business and compete with companies across the world. And we can text, email, Skype with people in the world.

    So studying abroad isn't just a fun way to spend a time of learning; it is quickly becoming the key to success in our times. Because getting ahead in today's workplaces isn't just about getting good grades or test scores in school, which are important. It's also about having real experience with the world beyond your borders­experience with languages, cultures and societies very different from your own. Or, as the Chinese saying goes: “It is better to travel ten thousand miles than to read ten thousand books.”

    Emily Temple-Wood was 12 years old the first time she was bullied(欺凌) online. They left ugly comments on her Wikipedia and Facebook pages about her looks “that would make my mother's hair curl.” says Temple-Wood, now 22 and in medical school. The reason? “I was a woman on the Internet,” she said.

    Over the years, she considered how she might take revenge(复仇). Then, as a freshman in college, it hit her: “What do misogynists (men who hate women) hate most?” she asked herself. “Women who are productive!” Her solution: For every rude comment she received, Temple-Wood would post a biography(传记) of a woman scientist, and thus, in 2012, Wiki Project Women Scientists was born. She wrote about her heroes, like Barbara McClintock, who received the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and Caroline Still Anderson, one of the first African American women to become a doctor in the United States, in the late 1800s. With help from other women, many of them scientists who have also been bullied online, Temple-Wood has published hundreds of these biographies and women of all ages have taken notice.

    “When I was a kid, I could count the number of women scientists I knew about on one hand,” wrote Siko Bouterse, who used to work for the Wikimedia Foundation. “But our daughters have the chance to get much more knowledge about scientists who look like them because of Emily.

    The ugly comments still come, says Temple-Wood. Being a strong woman online is not easy. “We all have days when we break down and need to have a glass of wine,” she says. “I tell people who are being bullied that it's OK to be sad. But now you need to find a productive way to take revenge.”

    You know those nutrition guidelines the government issues every few years? It turns out that following them isn't just good for your health. It's good for the planet, too.

    " What we found is that impacts vary across nations, but in the high­impact nations, in general, you can see that, if you follow a nationally recommended diet, despite the fact that these diets don't mention explicitly—or most of them don't explicitly mention—environmental impacts, that you are going to have lower environmental impacts due to that. So that's sort of fairly clear across all the high­income nations." said Paul Behrens, an environmental scientist at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

    The food we eat takes a big toll on the environment. A third of the ice­free land on Earth is used for agriculture, and according to some estimates, producing food accounts for roughly a fifth of all human­caused greenhouse gas emissions. Fertilizer runoff also leads to other problems, like the algae blooms in Lake Eerie and the Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico.

    However, following dietary guidelines would reduce those impacts, especially in wealthy countries like the US. "Most of the reductions come from meat and dairy," which have an outsized impact on land use and pollution, and are a major source of greenhouse gases.(That's partly due to cow farts. Seriously.) Following the suggestions would also mean eating fewer calories, since many people here eat more than they need.

    Overall, in high­income countries, Behren's team estimates that following the rules could result in as much as a 17 percent reduction in land use, a 21 percent reduction in nutrient pollution, and a 25 percent drop in agricultural greenhouse gas emissions. Cutting down on how much food we waste—which is roughly a third in the US—could help even more. The results are in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

    Of course, people are notoriously bad at following diets. But: "These nationally recommended guidelines do actually have a knock­on effect on other areas of policy making. So if I'm developing a new healthy­eating­for­schools program then that's going to be based off a lot of detail that I get from the nationally recommended guidelines. So while it might not necessarily be the case that people follow directly …they actually are quite influential on the preparation of other advice."

    It seems that a smaller environmental footprint and a healthier lifestyle could go hand in hand.