Baby girls make their way to dolls as soon as they can crawl, while boys will head for the toy cars,  a study has shown. The findings, the first to show consistent differences in very young babies, suggest there is a biological basis to their preferences.

    Psychologists Dr Brenda Todd from City University London carried out an experiment involving 90 babies aged nine months to 36 months. They were allowed to choose from seven toys. Some were boys' toys - a car, a digger, a ball and a blue teddy.  The rest were girls' toys: a pink teddy, a doll and a cooking set. They were placed a meter away from the toys, and could pick whichever toy they liked. Their choice and the amount of time they spent playing with each toy were recorded.

    Of the youngest children (nine to 14 months), girls spent much longer playing with the doll than boys, and boys spent much more time with the car and ball than the girls did. Among the two-and three-year-olds, girls spent 50 percent of the time playing with the doll while only two boys briefly touched it. The boys spent almost 90 percent of their time playing with cars, which the girls barely touched. There was no link between the parents' view on which toys were more appropriate for boys or girls, and the children's choice.

    Dr Brenda Todd said: “Children of this age are already exposed to much socialization. Boys may be given ‘toys that go' while girls get toys they can care for, which may help shape their preference. But these findings agree with the former idea that children show natural interests in particular kinds of toys. There could be a biological basis for their choices. Males through evolution have been adapted to prefer moving objects, probably through hunting instincts（本能）, while girls prefer warmer colors such as pink, the color of a newborn baby.”

    Don't you just hate it when you have to take an important phone call and you're surrounded by potential eavesdroppers(潜在偷听者)? You either have to whisper or go outside to keep the conversation private, which is not good. Now Hushme aims to fix this problem by muffling your voice and making you look like Bane in the film Batman.

    Hushme is a strange high-tech mask(口罩)that blocks the sound of the wearer's voice so that people nearby can't hear what is being said. It connects to your phone via Blucetooth and comes with a pair of earphones. When you get a private call, all you have to do is put the mask on and it will do the rest. The pair of thick pads over your mouth does a good job of muffling your voice, but to ensure nothing gets through. Hushme also has speakers that play a variety of sounds when you speak.

    The Hushme mask, which comes in a variety of colors, can be worn around the neck, like a regular pair of earphones, and attaches in front of your mouth thanks to a couple of very powerful magnets(磁铁). It's not yet clear how comfortable speaking with this Bane-like mask over your mouth really is, or how effective its speech muffling ability is, so we know so far is that it makes you look strange. The sound choices for covering your voice currently include wind, ocean, rain, birds, monkey, but new ones could be added in the future.

    Advertised as the “world's first voice mask for mobile phones'. Hushme was showed at CES. At the becoming of this year. Its makers plan to sell it by the end of this year. It will cost about $200.

    In today's world, English is the most wildly used language. It is our duty to learn English in the new situation of the reform and opening to the outside world. How can we master the English language? I'd like to give you some good advice.

    First, get interested in it. I enjoy listening to foreign friends talking when I was a child. At the same time I watched the English program Follow Me on TV. From then on, I kept on learning English. The more I learned, the more progress I made.

    Second, practice makes perfect. Many people study English very hard, but they are very shy to speak it in public, for they are afraid of making mistakes. Remember you have to make a mistake before you can correct it. A native English speaker makes mistakes sometimes, too.

    Third, the beginners should be encouraged to pay attention to idioms. The English language has many idioms. For example, you should say “ He is as strong as a cow.”

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    As the weather gets colder, we start wearing jackets, and most of us stop thinking about the sun. But the sun's rays can be just as harmful when it's cold and cloudy outside. "Any exposed area of your body can still get sunburned," Dr. Apple Bodemer, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Live Science.

    Whether you spend a day on the slopes, skating on a pond or clearing snow out of your driveway, your face is still getting exposed to the sun's radiation in the form of ultraviolet (紫外线) (UV) light, which can go deep into your skin cells causing DNA damage, according to Bodemer.

    The sun's long ultraviolet A (UVA) waves can cause earlier aging, sunspots and wrinkles, while its short ultraviolet B (UVB) rays are known for causing skin reddening and burns.

    Skin damage caused by UV exposure increases over time. More exposure to radiation contributes to more severe damage, even skin cancer. In addition, snow and ice can also make sun damage worse. They reflect up to 80 percent of UV rays reaching the ground. That means you get hit from both the sky and the ground. And skiers and snowboarders increase their risk of getting sunburned even more because UV exposure increases at higher altitudes.

    "Generally, the biggest factor for sun-sensitivity is how pale your skin is," he said. "But, the reality is that even the darkest individual can get sun damage."

    Luckily, the solution for protecting your skin is simple: Wear sunscreen every day. Rigel recommended using sunscreen with a sun protection factor (SPF) of at least 30, and going higher at high altitudes. As a rule of thumb, SPF 30 will block 97 percent of UVB rays, SPF 50 blocking 98 percent, and SPF 100 blocking 99 percent. Whatever kind of sunscreen you use, it's important to apply SPF about once every 2 hours.

    Rigel also suggested sunscreens with "broad spectrum (光谱)"—to protect against both UVB and UVA rays—as well as sunscreens that are water resistant for up to 80 minutes. That way, you can go about your day without it wearing off too quickly.

    "Make way, good people, make way, in the King's name! "cried he. "Open a text; and, I promise you, Mistress Prynne shall be set where man, woman, and child, may have a fair sight of her brave clothing, from this time till an hour past noon. A blessing on the moral Colony of the Massachusetts, where immorality is dragged out into the sunshine! Come along, Madam Hester, and show your scarlet （鲜红色的；罪孽深重的）letter in the market-place!

    A lane was at once opened through the crowd. Led by the beadle （狱吏），and attended by an irregular procession of serious-looking men and unkind-looking women, Hester Prynne set forth towards the place appointed for her punishment. A crowd of eager and curious schoolboys, understanding little of the matter in hand, except that it gave them a half-holiday, ran before her progress, turning their heads continually to stare into her face, and at the winking baby in her arms, and at the shameful letter on her breast.

    It was no great distance, in those days, from the prison-door to the market-place. Measured by the prisoner's experience, however, it might be considered to be a rather long journey; for, though her manner was proud, she perhaps underwent an extreme pain from every footstep of those who thronged to see her, as if her heart had been thrown into the street for them all to step upon. In our nature, however, there is a condition that the sufferer should never know the intensity of what he endures by its present suffering, but chiefly by the pain that rankles （使痛心）after it. With almost a calm manner, therefore, Hester Prynne passed through this portion of her suffering, and came to a sort of scaffold （刑台），at the western end of the market-place. It stood nearly beneath the eaves of Boston's earliest church, and appeared to be a fixture there.