More over smart phone, the intelligent watch is about to take your spot as the latest hi­tech current, allowing wearers to glance at messages and even take calls without touching their phones. The i'm Watch, available since 2011, is the flagship product of an Italian company—i'm. This smart watch is an assist to the smart phone, with which it can communicate by Bluetooth wireless technology. It means you can leave your phone in your pocket as you answer or reject a call, review e­mails or read updates from friends on Twitter or Facebook.

    The i'm Watch also has its own applications, such as i'm Sport, which links with a heart rate detector (检测器) to allow a runner to check his pulse. Such functions already exist in specialized sports watches but not on watches that are linked to smart phones.

    With a square shape, a 3.8­centimeter touch screen and various colors, the i'm Watch sells for a minimum of 300 Euros ($390) for the basic model and prices climb to 16 000 Euros for a luxury model in silver or decorated with diamonds.

    So far, the watch has already found 30 000 buyers, 80 percent of whom are men aged 25 to 50. “Seventy percent are iPhone users, 25 percent Samsung and the rest are other telephones using Google's Android operating system，” said Massimiliano Bertolini, a manager of the company, which aims to sell more than 200 000 watches this year. The company's target market is the person who is always glued to his smart phone, even in meetings or at the movies, or people who wish to keep an eye on their heartbeat during exercise. They will especially target women with advertisements emphasizing its design rather than its technology.

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    The Mandarin version of The Sound of Music will return to Beijing from Aug 18 to Sept 3,after its first tour of the country last year.Performed first in July 2016,the musical,produced by Seven Ages,a Beijing-based company devoting to adapting classical Western musicals into Chinese versions,has been staged more than 100 times and attracted over 100,000 people.

    The Broadway show,based on the book The Trapp Family Singers,which was written by Maria Von Trapp about her real-life experiences and published in 1949,made its debut in 1959.With music by Richard Rodgers and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II,it won five Tony Awards,including Best Musical.When the Oscar-winning film with the same title was screened in China in the 1970s,the movie,which was released by Twentieth Century Fox in 1964,was very popular,especially its songs,such as Do-Re-Mi and Edelweiss.The Broadway production and the production by composer Andrew Lloyd Webber both toured China in 2008 and 2014,which expanded its Chinese fan base.

    The upcoming tour will see actors,including 11-year-old Beijinger Qiu Jiahao and 5-year-old Liang Xiaoxian, play the seven children in the family.Fu Zhenhua,a graduate of the Shanghai Theater Academy,and Dang Wenwei,a graduate of the Shanghai Conservatory of Music,will play the roles of Captain Georg von Trapp and Maria Rainer.

    "My favorite aspect of this musical is the way it takes a look at various kinds of love we experience as human beings and even the love of things spiritual and unexplainable.And that is what I like most about The Sound of Music－it really is the sound of love," says Graves,a veteran Broadway director,who has lived and worked in China since 2002.

    After Beijing,the musical will be staged in Shenzhen in December and Shanghai next January.

If you go

    7:30 pm,Aug 18-Sept 3.Poly Theater,14 Dongzhimen Nandajie,Dongcheng district,Beijing,400-028-2577.

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.

    Until late in the 20th century, most Americans spent time with people of generations. Now mid-aged Americans may not keep in touch with old people until they are old themselves. That's because we group people by age. We put our three-year-olds together in day-care center, our 13-year-olds in school and sports activities, and our 80-year-olds in senior-citizen homes. Why?

    We live away from the old for many reasons: Different generations have different lifestyles. Besides, young people sometimes avoid the old to get rid of fears for aging and dying. It is much harder to watch someone we love disappear before our eyes. Sometimes it's so hard that we stay away from the people who need us most.

    Fortunately, some of us have found our way to the old. And we have discovered that they often save the young. A reporter moved her family onto a block filled with old people. At first her children were disappointed. But the reporter baked banana bread for the neighbors and had her children deliver it and visit. Soon the children had many new friends, with whom they shared food, stories and projects. “My children have never been less lonely,” the reporter said.

    The young, in turn, save the old. Once I was in a rest home when a visitor showed up with a baby. She was immediately surrounded. People who hadn't gotten out of bed in a week suddenly were ringing for a wheelchair. Even those who had seemed asleep wake up to watch the child. Babies have an astonishing power to comfort and cure.

    Grandparents are a special case. They give grandchildren a feeling of security and continuity. As my husband put it, “my grandparents gave me a deep sense that things would turn out right in the end.”

    Grandchildren speak of attention they don't get from worried parents. “My parents were always telling me to hurry up, and my grandparents told me to slow down,” one friend said. A teacher told me she can tell which pupils have relationships with grandparents: they are quieter, calmer, more trusting.

    It is made from grapes grown without pesticides (杀虫剂) and chemicals, is kind to the environment and rarely causes hangovers (宿醉). Sales of organic(有机的) wine are booming in the UK.

    According to the organic food and farming group Soil Association, sales of organic beers, wines and spirits rose by 14.3% last year to reach nearly ￡6 million, driven by the demand from consumers who are increasingly seeking “natural” food.

    “It seems that people are rediscovering their link with the environment through organic food. Organic wines also taste better, perhaps due to less use of man-made chemicals.” said Finn Cottle of Soil Association. As well as the benefits of producing grapes without using pesticides, organic wine also contains less sulphur dioxide (二氧化硫), which can contribute towards hangovers.

    Supermarkets are increasing supplies on their shelves to meet consumer demand, while the switch to online shopping has also helped, as people are more easily able to find what they are looking for. Vintage Roots is now one of the UK's biggest online shops of organic wine, while Ocado provides more than 100 different organic wines and Daylesford, best-known for its organic vegetable boxes, has branched out into organic wine and spirits.

    The discount supermarket Aldi is set to start its first collection of so-called “green” wines this week, offering eight wines with organic certificates. Aldi expects the wines to appeal to the young shoppers who are increasingly concerned about the environmental influence of the produce that they are buying and consuming.

    English organic wine producer Oxney Estate's Noir Rosé recently won the Waitrose prize for the most outstanding rosé wine at the competition. A spokeswoman for Waitrose said:“Organic wine is a growing trend globally and we have seen sales increase by 16% in the last year”.

    The common cold is the world's most widespread illness, which is probably why there are more myths(神话) about it than any of the other illnesses.

    The most widespread mistake of all is that colds are caused by cold. They are not. They are caused by viruses passing on from person to person. You catch a cold by coming into contact, directly or indirectly, with someone who already has one. If cold causes colds, it would be reasonable to expect the Eskimos to suffer from them forever. But they do not. And in isolated Arctic regions explorers have reported being free from colds until coming into contact again with infected(感染的) people from the outside world by way of packages and mails dropped from airplanes.

    At the Common Cold Research Unit in England, volunteers took part in Experiments in which they gave themselves to the discomforts of being cold and wet for long stretches of time. After taking hot baths, they put on bathing suits, allowed themselves to be doused(浸入) with cold water, and then stood about dripping(滴干)wet in drafty(通风的) rooms. Some wore wet socks all day while others exercised in the rain until close to exhaustion. Not one of the volunteers came down with a cold unless a cold virus was actually dropped in his nose.

    If cold and wet have nothing to do with catching colds, why are they more frequent in the winter? In spite of the most painstaking research, no one has yet found the answer. One explanation offered by scientists is that people tend to stay together indoors more in cold weather than at other times, and this makes it easier for cold viruses to be passed on.

    No one has yet found a cure for the cold. There are drugs and pain suppressors such as aspirin, but all they do is to relieve the symptoms.