Loneliness is like a disease, and what's worse, it's contagious. It can spread from one person to another, according to the recent research that stresses the power of one person's emotions to affect even people he doesn't know.

    The new analysis, involving 4,793 people who were interviewed every two years between 2005 and 2015, showed that a friend of a lonely person was 52％ more likely to develop feelings of loneliness by the time of the next interview. A friend of that person was 25％ more likely, and a friend of a friend of a friend was 15％ more likely.

“Loneliness is not just the property of an individual. It can be transmitted across people—even people you don't have direct contact with,” said John T. Cacioppo, a psychologist of the University of Chicago who led the study published in the December issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

    Loneliness has been linked to medical problems, including depression, sleep problems and generally poorer physical health. Identifying some of the causes could help reduce the emotion and improve health, experts said.

Although the study did not examine how loneliness spreads, Cacioppo said another research has provided clues. “Let's say for whatever reason you get lonely. You then interact with other people in a more negative fashion. That puts them in a negative mood and makes them more likely to interact with other people in a negative fashion and they minimize their social ties and become lonely,” Cacioppo said.

According to Cacioppo, loneliness spread more easily among women than men, perhaps because women were more likely to express emotions.

Lonely people become less and less trusting others. This makes it more and more difficult for them to make friends－and more likely that society will reject them. Therefore, it is important to recognize and deal with loneliness．Cacioppo emphasizes people who have been pushed to the edges of society should receive help to repair their social networks.

    I am a volunteer. I set out to help clean up the beach after a violent storm a year ago. The sight I saw was heartbreaking. The broken houses seemed to be crying. I couldn't describe how I felt. But something special among the debris (废墟) turned my day around.

    I joined a club to clean up the beach after the storm last November. As I removed the debris from the beach, I noticed an object with shiny buttons in the wet sand. It was a jacket，and I was excited since Halloween(万圣节) was coming and I thought I had found a great costume(戏服). After picking it up, I was able to see that the jacket was from West Point (西点军校), the United States Military Academy, and it had the name “deGavre” written inside. I realized the jacket might be important to someone. I decided to find the jacket's owner and return it.

    I called the West Point Museum, considering that if the family couldn't be found, the jacket should go there. The museum connected me with Kim McDermott, Director of Communications for the Academy's Association of Graduates. Kim soon ensured that the jacket had belonged to Chester Braddock deGavre, who was a 1933 graduate and a war hero, but passed away in 1993.

    I sent Kim a photo of the jacket and she posted it to the West Point Association of Graduates Facebook Page, asking if anyone could help us find the family. In less than two hours, someone had found and called the hero's wife, Teresa. Soon I started to receive personal messages from members of the deGavre family, their friends and others who were touched by the story and they found me on Facebook.

    Finding Chester deGavre's jacket and connecting to his family with the help of Facebook have been so meaningful to me. I've formed a bond(纽带) with amazing people I might have never met.

    Have you ever wanted to travel back in time? What about traveling into the future? There's an easy way to do it.

    One way you can make a time travel journey is by writing a letter to your future self to be opened in the future. To your future self, the letter will be a visit from the past. What can be gained by writing a letter to yourself? It depends on how good your letter is. You have the chance to say something to your future self. What would you want to communicate? You'll be able to talk to yourself 5, 10, 15 years down the road. There may be instructions for your future self, or you may have goals that you will want to check up on.

    There are a lot of things you could include in your letter or letters to yourself. The more you include, the better the letter will be to you. Here are some ideas of things to include in your letter:

    Your thoughts and feelings about life, religion, politics, society, etc.

Your feelings for your family.

Your likes and dislikes.

Your dreams.

    The type of person you want yourself to become.…

    Be creative with what you put in your letter. Include a picture of yourself or family to show the period from which the letter came.

    You can store your letter in many different ways. You can give your letter to a friend or family member to keep and mail to you. If you can get others to take part, have them write letters to themselves as well and ask someone to be the letter holder until it's time to send the letters. You can also use a service online to store your letter and e-mail it to you.

    Make the most of your letter writing, and you will help your future self make the most of the present.

    Mark Twain left school when he was twelve. He had little school education. In spite of (尽管) this, he became the most famous writer of his time. He made millions of dollars by writing. His real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens, but he is better known all over the world as Mark Twain, his pen-name.

    Mark Twain was born in 1835 and he was not a healthy baby. In fact, he was not expected to live through the first winter. But with his mother's tender care, he managed to survive. As a boy, he caused much trouble for his parents. He used to play jokes on all of his friends and neighbors. He didn't like to go to school, and he constantly ran away from home. He always went in the direction of the nearby Mississippi (密西西比河). He was nearly drowned (淹死) nine times.

    After his father's death in 1847, Mark twain began to work for a printer, who only provided him with food and clothing. Then, he worked as a printer, a river-boat pilot and later joined the army. But shortly after that he became a miner. During this period, he started to write short stories. Afterwards he became a full-time writer.

    In 1870, Mark Twain got married. In the years that followed he wrote many books including Tom Sawyer in 1876, and Huckleberry Finn in 1884, which made him famous, and brought him a great fortune (财富).

    Unfortunately, Mark Twain got into debts in bad investments (投资) and he had to write large numbers of stories to pay these debts. In 1904, his wife died, and then three of their children passed away.

    At the age of 70, his hair was completely white. He bought many white suits and neckties. He wore nothing but white from head to foot until his death on April 21, 1910.

    Runners who encounter visual and auditory distractions (干扰)may be more likely to suffer leg injuries, according to research by the Association of Academic Physiatrists in Las Vegas. Runners often seek distraction from the task at hand. Whether it be music, texting, daydreaming, taking in the sights, or propping a book up on the treadmill(跑步机), more often than not a distraction is welcome. But, researchers from the University of Florida have recently discovered those distractions may lead to injury.

    Daniel Herman, MD, assistant professor at University of Florida, and his team conducted research on the effects of visual and auditory distractions on 14 runners to determine what effect these distractions would have on things such as heart rate, how many times a runner breathes per minute and how much oxygen is consumed by the body.

    The runners were all injury-free at the time of the study and ran 31 miles each week. Dr . Herman's team had each participant run on a treadmill three separate times. The first time was without any distractions. The second time added a visual distraction, during which the runners concentrated on a screen displaying different letters in different colors with the runner having to note when a specific letter-color combination appeared. The third time added an auditory distraction similar to the visual distraction, with the runner having to note when a certain word was spoken by a certain voice.

    When compared to running without distractions, the participants applied force faster to their left and right legs called loading rate, with auditory and visual distractions. They also experienced an increased amount of force from the ground on both legs, called ground reaction force, with auditory distractions. Finally, the runners tended to breathe heavier and have higher heart rates with visual and auditory distractions than without any distractions at all.

    "Running in environments with different distractions may unfavorably affect running performance and increase injury risk," explains Dr. Herman. "Sometimes these things cannot be helped, but you may be able to minimize potentially cumulative(累积的) effects. For example, when running a new route in a chaotic environment such as during a destination of marathon, you may want to skip listening to something which may require more attention - like a new song playlist."

    Dr. Herman's team will continue to investigate the potential relationship between distracted running and leg injuries, and any effect this relationship has on different training techniques that use auditory or visual cues.

    Organic food, grown without artificial chemicals, is increasingly popular nowadays. Consumers (消费者) have been willing to pay up to twice as much for goods with organic labels (标签). However, if you think paying a little more for organic food gets you a more nutritious and safer product, then you'd better save your money. A study led by researchers at Stanford University says that organic products aren't necessarily more nutritious, and they're no less likely to suffer from disease-causing bacteria, either.

    For their new study, Smith-Spangler and her colleagues conducted a review of two categories（种类）of research, including 17 studies that compared health outcomes between consumers of organic against traditional food products, and 223 studies that analyzed(分析) the nutritional content of the foods, including key vitamins, minerals and fats.

    While the researchers found little difference in nutritional content, they did find that organic fruit and vegetables were 20% less likely to have chemicals remaining on the surfaces. Neither organic nor traditional foods showed levels of chemicals high enough to go beyond food safety standards(标准). And both organic and traditional meats, such as chicken and pork, were equally likely to be harmed by bacteria at very low rates. The researchers did find that organic milk and chicken contained higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids, a healthy fat also found in fish that can reduce the risk of heart disease. However, these nutritional differences were too small, and the researchers were unwilling to make much of them until further studies confirm the trends.

    Organic food is produced with fewer chemicals and more natural-growing practices, but that doesn't always translate into a more nutritious or healthier product. The U. S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) states that "whether you buy organic or not, finding the freshest foods available may have the biggest effect on taste." Fresh food is at least as good as anything marketed as organic.