As I walked along the Edgware Road, I felt as though the world was closing in on me. All the sounds I take for granted, had gone. I had entered a world of silence. This unsettling experience occurred a few weeks ago when I agreed to go deaf for the day to support the work of the charity Hearing Dogs for Deaf People, for which I am an ambassador.

    When I managed to take a cab to the office of my manager, Gavin, I couldn't hear what the taxi driver was saying to me. Conversation was impossible. Then, when I reached the office, I had to ring the intercom five times as I couldn't hear a response.

    Everybody said I was shouting at them—I simply wasn't aware of how loudly I was speaking as I couldn't hear my own voice. Gavin kept telling me my phone was ringing, but I didn't realize. I was too busy trying to concentrate on reading his lips. And when he tried to tell me a code to put into my phone, I had to keep asking him to repeat it, more slowly. Eventually he lost his patience and snapped at me: “Just give me the phone!” I was shocked.

    People couldn't be bothered to repeat themselves, so they kept trying to do things for me that I was perfectly capable of doing myself. I felt I'd lost control.

    Being deaf for the day was extraordinarily tiring. I had to work so hard to “listen” with my eyes, get people's attention and use my other senses to make up for my lack of hearing. It was a huge, exhausting effort.

    Until that experience I didn't realize how much I took my own hearing for granted, or the sorts of emotions and experiences deaf people go through. If a deaf person asks you to repeat something, never think: “It doesn't matter.” It does matter.

    Staying up late is a potential battle between parents and kids. But the solution could be as simple as changing your meal time.

    Researchers at the University of Surrey, UK, found that delaying (延迟) meals could help change one of the internal (内部的) body clocks. Besides a “master” clock in the brain, there are clocks in other parts of the body. They are usually synchronized (同步的) according to factors including light.

    During the study, researchers tested 10 participants to study the effect of changing meal times on their body clocks. The participants were given three meals – breakfast, lunch and dinner. In the first stage, participants received breakfast 30 minutes after waking. Lunch and dinner followed, after 5-hour intervals (间隔). In the second stage, each meal was delayed by 5 hours. Right after each stage, blood and fat samples (样本) were collected.

    Results showed that later meal times greatly influenced blood sugar levels. A 5-hour delay in meal times caused a 5-hour delay in the internal blood sugar rhythms (规律性变化).

    The discovery showed that meal times are in line with (与……一致) the body clock that controls blood sugar levels.

    This is a small study but the researchers believed the findings could help jet lag (飞行时差反应) sufferers and night-shift (夜班的) workers.

    In a study by the University of Surrey in 2013, researchers explored what happened when a person's body was changed from a normal pattern to that of a night-shift worker's.

    After people work through the night, over 97 percent of the body's rhythmic genes are disrupted (扰乱).

    These findings explain why we feel so bad following a long flight, or after working at night, according to Simon Archer, one of the study's researchers.

    “It's like living in a house. There's a clock in every room in the house and in all of those rooms those clocks are now disrupted, which of course leads to chaos (混乱) in the household,” fellow researcher Derk-Jan Dijk told the BBC.

    Changing meal times didn't affect the “master” body clock – the one controlling when we get sleepy – but it can reset the body clock that controls blood sugar levels.

    This wouldn't necessarily cure jet lag completely, but it might reduce the negative effects.

    A study published earlier this year suggested that just a weekend camping trip could be enough to reset our body clocks. And now this latest research shows regular food schedules could play a key part too.

    For those concerned about wrinkly old skin, it might be a creative solution: an elastic(有弹性的) “second skin” that can be smoothed on to make aged tissue look more youthful.

    The wearable film, developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has shown promise in a series of small experiments where it was applied to wrinkles, under-eye bags and areas of dry skin. When applied to the face or body, the thin, transparent layer sticks to the skin and supports the tissue, making it look and behave like younger skin, its producers claim.

    “What we've been able to do is create a cream that you can put on the skin, and then when it's on the skin it can actually form, essentially, an elastic second skin,” said Bob Langer, who led the research. Tests in the lab found that the polymer film (高分子膜), which is only 70 thousandths of a millimeter thick, reduced the appearance of wrinkles and under-eye bags, and helped keep moisture (水分) in areas of dry skin.

    The layer is designed to be applied in the morning, then peeled off at night, In previous studies, the second skin withstood normal daily wear, and the stresses and strains of exercise and swimming, without falling off or causing irritation. It also survived exposure to rain.

    “It's something you can wear for a whole day or longer, depending on the physical forces that get applied to the area where it is worn, "said Daniel Anderson, who helped develop the product at MIT. “You can't tell you're wearing it.”

    While normal cosmetics can mask imperfections on the skin, the new coating changes the way skin behaves by giving it the elasticity of young skin. It was developed with help from two companies.

    This may be sad to hear, but the number of Britain's famous red telephone boxes has been falling for decades. The phone box is well-known to foreign fans of Britain and visitors to the country. There are still many left to enjoy, however.

    There is deep feeling for the bright red boxes with the Queen's coat of arms (盾形徽章). The places that still have the red box are mostly small and in the countryside. In these places, the phone box may be a symbol of community, as well as a landmark (地标).

    But there are still several cities, including London, that still have original red phone boxes in place.

    For tourists, they probably make the perfect place for a selfie (自拍照). Visit London any day in the summer and you'll see people with their smartphones taking photos with the red box behind them. People who receive the photo will have no trouble guessing where the selfie was taken.

    Ever since mobile phones became more widespread, there has been less and less point in public phones. But although the red boxes are no longer popular places to make a call from, new uses are being found for them all the time. The famous design created by Giles Gilbert Scott back in 1924 lives on, but in ways the British architect (建筑师) would never have imagined.

    Some of the new ways the phone boxes are being used are quite unusual. For example, some have been changed into tiny coffee shops. Others are hat stores. In one distant area of the country, a red box that had not been used for a long time has been turned into a small lending library.

    Even back in their heyday in the last century, phone boxes were put to other uses. Some people even used them as toilets in an emergency.

But for many, they were a safe place to hide if you were caught up in the rain. Britain's weather is unpredictable: sun one moment, heavy rain the next. So if you are planning to visit the UK and want the perfect British selfie, standing inside a red telephone box in a rainstorm may be your best bet.

    Body language is a broad term for several forms of communication using body movements or gestures, instead of, or as a complement to, sounds, verbal language, or other forms of communication. In turn, it is one category of paralanguage, which describes all forms of human communication that are not language.

    Paralanguage including body language has been extensively studied in social psychology. In everyday speech and popular psychology, the term is most often applied to body language that is thought to be involuntary, but in fact the distinction between voluntary and involuntary body language is often blurred: a smile or a wave may be given either voluntarily or involuntarily, for example.

    Voluntary Body Language is less commonly discussed because it seems unproblematic. It refers to movement, gestures and poses intentionally made by the person: smiling, hands, imitating actions, and generally making movements with full or partial intention of making them and a realization of what they communicate.

    The relation of body language to animal communication has often been discussed. Human paralanguage may represent a continuation of forms of communication that our non-linguistic ancestors already used, or it may be that it has been changed by co-existing language. Some species of animals are especially skilled at detecting human body language, both voluntary and involuntary: this was the reason for trying to teach the chimpanzee Washoe American Sign Language rather than speech and perhaps the reason why the Washoe project was more successful than some previous efforts to teach apes how to dance.

    Body language is a product of both genetic and environmental influences. Blind children will smile and laugh even though they have never seen a smile. The ethnologist (文化人类学者) Iraneus Eibl-Eibesfeldt claimed that a number of basic elements of body language were universal across cultures and must therefore be fixed action patterns under instinctive (本能的) control. Some forms of human body language show continuities with communicative gestures of other apes, though often with changes in meaning. More refined gestures, which vary between cultures (for example the gestures to indicate "yes" and "no"), must obviously be learned or modified through learning, usually by unconscious observation of the environment.

    When a group of children politely stop a conversation with you, saying, "We have to go to work now." you're left feeling surprised and certainly uneasy. After all, this is the 21st century and the idea of children working is just unthinkable. This is, until you are told that they are all pupils of stage schools, and that the "work" they go off to is to go on the stage in a theatre.

    Stage schools often act as agencies to supply children for stage and television work. More worthy of the name "stage school" are those few places where children attend full time, with a training for the theatre and a general education.

    A visit to such schools will leave you in no doubt that the children enjoy themselves. After all, what lively children wouldn't settle for spending only half the day doing ordinary school work, and acting, singing or dancing their way through the other half of the day?

    Then of course there are times for the children to make a name and make a little money in some big shows. Some stage schools give their children too much professional work at such a young age. But the law is very tight on the amount they can do. Those under 13 are limited to 40 days in the year; those over 13 to 80 days.

    The schools themselves admit that not all children will be successful in the profession for which they are being trained. So what happens to those who don't make it? While all the leading schools say they place great importance on children getting good study results, the facts seem to suggest this is not always the case.